Voters are open, narrowly, to an effort to tackle inefficiencies in government. But they are concerned about billionaire Elon Musk and how his Department of Government Efficiency is executing those cuts, according to a national NBC News poll.
Asked whether creating DOGE was a good idea or a bad idea, 46% say the idea was good, 40% say it was bad, and another 13% do not have an opinion. Most voters have a strong opinion: 40% say DOGE is “strongly a good idea,” while 37% say it’s “strongly a bad idea.”
However, when voters are asked more broadly to rate their feelings toward DOGE, the findings flip: 41% say they hold positive views of the effort and 47% hold negative views. And Musk himself is unpopular, with 51% holding negative views of the tech mogul and 39% viewing him positively.
The findings come as the effort to slash the size of the federal government has dominated the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration, with cuts to government spending and the federal workforce proceeding at a dizzying pace. Attempts by DOGE to access sensitive information, lay off workers and cancel contracts have sparked a broad range of lawsuits.
Trump has taken note of the controversy around DOGE, posting on social media earlier this month that department secretaries would be in charge of job cuts at their agencies and would use “the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’” The post came after a Cabinet meeting in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy challenged Musk’s work in their departments.
Read more from the NBC News poll
Meanwhile, Americans believe that the public sector could be doing more, not less, even as voters like the general idea of rooting out inefficiencies in government.
Asked for their view of the government, 56% say it should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people, while 42% say the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.
About half of voters (49%) say they have positive views about federal workers, while 21% view them negatively and 29% feel neutral about them. That’s a marked decline from Jan. 2019, the last time NBC News asked the question, when 63% of adults held positive views of federal employees. But the current numbers are also slightly up from the measurements in Feb. 2011, when 42% of adults felt positively toward federal workers.
Asked to reflect on DOGE, one-third of voters said Musk and DOGE’s efforts to reduce spending and the size of the federal government “should continue as much more needs to be done.” Another 28% say “it is needed but should slow down to assess the impact.” And another 33% say “it is reckless and should stop now before more damage is done.”
Just 4% say “there is no need to cut the size of the federal government and its spending.”
Democratic pollster Aileen Cardona-Arroyo of Hart Research Associates told NBC News that when voters are given that ability to express nuance, “we start seeing a lot of people in that squishy middle.” The firm conducted the survey with Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm.
“It tells us that a lot of people are willing to give DOGE the benefit of the doubt,” Cardona-Arroyo said, but “for a majority of voters, either they want things to slow down and re-evaluate, or think that maybe things are, a little bit, going in the wrong direction.”
That skepticism or outright rejection of DOGE’s efforts also comes as 27% of respondents say they or someone they know has “been negatively impacted by reductions or cuts to federal benefits, programs, or services as a result of changes enacted by DOGE.” That group is heavily concentrated among self-identified Democrats, but geographically, it is relatively spread out across the country.
Some of the negative impacts were direct, according to a handful of verbatim responses from poll respondents. One cited a niece at a nonprofit that lost its grant money, another a child who works at the Department of Education, and others mentioned federal government employees who are either at risk of or lost their jobs.
“I know federal workers and projects they worked on for years were cut, and they were for the benefit of the American people,” said one New Jersey woman who works in local government and doesn’t identify with either major party.
Other respondents raised nonspecific concerns about future uncertainty for them or their loved ones. And some who answered yes on already feeling a negative impact conflated DOGE’s early cuts with concerns that congressional Republicans could eye cuts to Medicaid or other programs in their future budget bill.
Fourteen percent of voters say they or someone they know is a federal employee who has been laid off as a result of changes enacted by DOGE.
The NBC News poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters from March 7-11 via a mix of telephone interviews and an online survey sent via text message. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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