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People like the idea of cutting government waste. But they dislike Mr. Musk, and they’re down on the Department of Government Efficiency.
April 22, 2025, 6:40 p.m. ET
The idea that the government is wasteful and inefficient has been a long-held view by most Americans for decades, surveys have found. And Americans mostly support the concept of the Department of Government Efficiency, commonly referred to as DOGE.
But they generally are not pleased with many of the details, particularly the involvement of the billionaire businessman Elon Musk, according to a New York Times review of polls on the subject. And concern begins to transcend predictable partisan divisions when voters are asked about DOGE’s plans to access sensitive information such as the data the government has on Americans.
When given a broad set of options for whether DOGE should continue, less than 40 percent of voters said that DOGE should stop its work entirely, according to a March poll by NBC News. But respondents who expressed support for DOGE were split between thinking it should continue at the current pace and thinking it should slow down to assess impact.
When respondents are forced to choose between two options — whether they approve or disapprove of DOGE — as many as 60 percent of respondents express negative sentiment.
Some pollsters explicitly give respondents the option of saying they are uncertain or have a neutral opinion about DOGE. (Other pollsters accept that answer only if the respondent volunteers it.) Polls that include this option show slightly less negative sentiment; in other words, respondents who might otherwise have said they disliked DOGE instead answered that they were neutral toward it.
The image of the broad government cuts has become linked with Mr. Musk, who is leading the effort and regularly floats plans on X, the social media website he owns, to slash government spending. The breadth of Mr. Musk’s influence has touched off some infighting in Mr. Trump’s administration, including during a contentious cabinet meeting, and has caused some Republicans on Capitol Hill to make direct appeals to Mr. Musk to try to limit the effects on their constituents. Mr. Trump himself suggested Mr. Musk should work with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet.”
In a Quinnipiac University poll taken this month, 57 percent of voters — including 16 percent of Republicans — said that Mr. Musk had too much power in decisions that affect the country.
Views of Mr. Musk have taken a hit, as well. Over the last four years, he has gone from having a mostly positive approval rating among the voters who had heard of him to a deeply negative one.
Mr. Musk’s drop in popularity has come almost entirely from Democrats and independent voters, while his ratings have improved among Republicans.
While many poll findings about DOGE yield findings with relatively predictable partisan divides, there is at least one area that has elicited broad objection: efforts to access and consolidate data from agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Neary two-thirds of Americans express some concern when asked about the access of Mr. Musk’s team to that data.
Ruth Igielnik is a Times polling editor who conducts polls and analyzes and reports on the results.
Christine Zhang is an editor in the graphics department at The Times.
