By Kate Amara
February 7, 2025
‘This president came into office, and he immediately attacked civil servants, and over 150,000 civil servants are Marylanders’
WASHINGTON —Maryland’s newly elected U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks called recent White House executive orders illegal, intentionally destabilizing and cruel.
“This president came into office, and he immediately attacked civil servants, and over 150,000 civil servants are Marylanders. So, it’s been a really, really difficult time,” Alsobrooks told 11 News.
She’s so new on the job that she’s still working out of temporary space in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. But Alsobrooks told 11 News on Friday that hasn’t stopped her from pushing back against the White House and what she called “17 days of chaos by design.”
“We’ve seen so much chaos happening all at one time, and so we’ve rolled our sleeves up here,” Alsobrooks told 11 News. “In the last Trump administration, some Democrats said we made a mistake by being outraged about everything. How do you navigate what to fight back against and what to not fight against? I think people have a right to feel enraged about all of it. All of it’s horrible.”
The senator’s team and others are fielding so many calls from concerned constituents that the Senate phone system shut down this week.
“Oh my God, the flood … the phones literally, this week, stopped working, some of them — the phones and the voicemails — and it was a systemwide issue in the Senate because we have so many calls coming in,” Alsobrooks told 11 News.
Alsobrooks shared with 11 News an update on her efforts in Congress and through constituent services to oppose executive orders and White House actions she believes are unconstitutional, illegal and designed to create chaos.
On Thursday, Alsobrooks cast a no vote on the nomination of Russell Vought for director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The vote was taken despite 30 hours of opposition by unified Senate Democrats.
The vote also came amid a flurry of new court filings in a series of federal lawsuits fighting recent White House executive orders and actions over transgender health care, birthright citizenship and the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“We’re using every tool that we can here in the Senate. We held the floor for about 30 hours this week. I participated in that. We are demanding answers from this administration, and we’re going to continue,” Alsobrooks told 11 News.
They’re still working out the details for a Tele-Town Hall for federal employees next week. The senator’s office said information will be posted as soon as it’s finalized across Alsobrooks’ social media accounts: X, Facebook and Instagram.