Frank Pallone wants to be a bulwark against Trump. Is he succeeding?

As President Donald Trump and his administration work to radically reshape Washington D.C., congressional Democrats are in a tough spot. They frequently rail against Trump’s actions, which they say are in many cases illegal, but faced with a GOP majority that rarely deigns to work with them on major issues, they have little power at their disposal to achieve their goals and push back on Trump.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) is still trying.

Pallone is, and has been for more than a decade, the top Democrat on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, putting him at the center of many of the top policy fights of Trump’s second term. And he’s spent the early months of the new presidential administration pursuing an aggressive strategy against Trump: essentially every day for the last three months, he’s organized letters denouncing Trump’s policies, pushed for investigations into the firings of top watchdogs and bureaucrats, or used committee hearings to decry Republicans’ agenda.

Alongside his fellow Democratic committee heads, many of them multi-decade veterans of the House like him, Pallone has become something of a leader within the official side of the Democratic resistance to Trump. In an interview with the New Jersey Globe last week, Pallone said that even if his letters and statements don’t lead to policy changes, he wants them to at least increase awareness of what Republicans are trying to do.

“Because our committee has jurisdiction over a lot of things, many of these policies that Trump is trying to put in place run through our committee – and we’ll try to stop them,” he said. “Which is what we’re trying to do with the Medicaid cuts: call attention at our hearings and in our investigations to how devastating these policies are or will be, or point out that they’re illegal and how they hurt the American people.”

From a public pressure perspective, efforts by Pallone and other Democrats have seemed to find some early success, especially when it comes to Medicaid.

The budget resolution that Republicans passed in recent months directs the Energy & Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in spending, a seemingly vague directive that Pallone (and nonpartisan analysts) say in reality would mean a massive Medicaid cut. Their protestations have made what might normally be an obscure congressional process into a high-profile debate over a very popular health care program, and many Republicans have now specifically gone on the record to say that they oppose any potential Medicaid cuts.

“I think we’re moving the Republicans, and making it harder and harder for them to adopt these Trump policies, at least the ones within our committee,” Pallone said. “Now, if they vote for Medicaid cuts, you’re going to go back and say, ‘You said you weren’t going to!’”

But as Pallone himself will admit, as long as Republicans are in the majority (even a historically narrow one), his power is heavily limited. Pallone said that he’s tried to get new Energy & Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) to investigate a number of issues related to the Trump administration, and while Guthrie has sounded amenable at times – “Oh, maybe we’ll have a hearing,” Pallone paraphrased – he hasn’t actually taken action.

As for the many letters Pallone has led to the Trump administration, sometimes in conjunction with his fellow New Jerseyans or other Energy & Commerce Democrats, they serve as written proof of Democrats’ objections to Trump’s actions, but there’s little indication that anyone in Trump’s orbit cares very much what they think.

A letter Pallone and the New Jersey Democratic delegation sent to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick yesterday excoriating cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, could be helpful from a public awareness perspective; the letter warns that NOAA cuts will hobble weather prediction and flood mitigation, issues of particular importance for New Jersey’s coastal communities. But it’s likely to fall on deaf ears in a presidential administration committed to reducing funding even for widely respected pieces of the federal government.

Pallone also faces a tough choice when bipartisan legislation comes before the Energy & Commerce Committee, like when a series of bills, among them one proposal to increase ticketing transparency and another to target those who disseminate non-consensual AI pornography, were put for a vote last week.

Pallone and his fellow Democrats supported the bills, and more generally have shown little interest in grinding the committee to a total halt. But at the same time, he said that he wants to make it clear how destructive he thinks the Trump administration has been, in many cases taking actions that hobble the very bipartisan bills that Congress is passing.

“I still want the committee to move,” he said. “I still want us to pass bills… But at the same time, I’m not willing to just act like it’s business as usual. So I constantly bring up the fact that it’s not business as usual. Sure, you can pass a bill like the TICKET Act, but it’s not going to do any good if it’s not enforced because you fired the commissioners and there’s no staff to do the enforcement.”

The fight for Democratic relevance within the Energy and Commerce Committee mirrors debates Democrats are having nationwide about how best to react to the Trump administration. To what extent should Democrats proceed with “business as usual” – in order to vote against Republican bills and deliver funding for their districts, they need to actually be in Congress to do their jobs, after all – and to what extent should they be fighting Trump from outside of traditional power structures?

New Jersey’s own Senator Cory Booker became a something of celebrity earlier this month with his 25-hour anti-Trump marathon, a speech that galvanized many Democrats looking for someone to take the fight to Congress – though he still did carefully abide by the Senate’s floor rules. Before Booker, there was Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), who briefly became a Republican target after she said at a protest that “we are at war” over government funding.

And there’s also New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, whose legal efforts alongside the country’s other Democratic attorney generals have been more successful at halting Trump priorities than just about anything else, even if they don’t always draw flashy headlines.

Pallone said that in conversations with his own constituents, he hears their frustrations and their desire for fighters in Congress. But he also doesn’t believe that his district’s voters – many of whom voted for Trump last year after years of supporting Democrats – are looking for obstructionism.

“A lot of people, like at the town hall meeting we had [on March 28], will say, ‘No business as usual,’” he said. “Well, what does that mean? To me, it doesn’t mean, ‘Don’t have the hearing, don’t have the markup.’… I think the committee process, and what we do, is still very important to reach the goals of the people that want us to accomplish something.”

The work that the Energy & Commerce Committee does is going to become even more critical in the coming weeks, with Republican leaders looking to hold a markup on reconciliation legislation – including potential Medicaid cuts – on May 7, per Punchbowl News. That will put Pallone, as well as fellow New Jersey Reps. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), into a huge national spotlight.

Democrats will undoubtedly bash whatever proposals Republicans put before the committee, but if the GOP has the votes to pass their bill, there’s little Democrats will be able to do to stop it. The party may be able to get its revenge in the 2026 midterms, when the Republican majority will be at stake; until then, Pallone said he’ll continue using the levers of power he has at his disposal to fight back, even if those levers aren’t as formidable as he likely wishes they were.

“I know sometimes people get frustrated; they say, ‘Are you having success?’” he said. “And I think we are having success, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done, because the magnitude of Trump’s policies and the hurt they’re inflicting on the country is devastating.”