Voters are openly open to an effort to address inefficiencies in the government. But they are concerned about billionaire Elon Musk and how their government efficiency department is executing those cuts, according to a national NBC news survey.
When asked if creating dogas was a good idea or a bad idea, 46% say that the idea was good, 40% say it was bad and another 13% do not have an opinion. Most voters have a solid opinion: 40% say that Dege is “strongly a good idea”, while 37% say it is “strongly a bad idea.”
However, when the voters are asked more widely to qualify their feelings towards Doge, the findings become: 41% say they have positive opinions about the effort and 47% have negative opinions. And Musk itself is unpopular, with 51% with negative opinions of the technological tycoon and 39% see it positively.
The findings occur when the effort to reduce the size of the federal government has dominated the first weeks of the administration of President Donald Trump, with cuts to government expenditure and the Federal workforce that proceeds at a dizzying pace. Doge attempts to access confidential information, fire workers and cancel contracts have caused a wide range of demands.
Trump has taken note of the controversy around Doge, publishing on social networks earlier this month that the department’s secretaries would be in charge of employment cuts in their agencies and would use “the ‘scalpel’ instead of the ‘ax’. The position occurred after a cabinet meeting in which the Secretary of State for the State of Rubio and the Secretary of Transportation of Transportation. Musk in their departments.
Read more of the NBC News survey
Meanwhile, Americans believe that the public sector could be doing more, not less, even when voters like the general idea of eradicating inefficiencies in government.
When his vision of the government was asked, 56% say they should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people, while 42% say that the government is doing too many things better to companies and individuals.
About half of the voters (49%) say they have positive opinions about federal workers, while 21% sees them negatively and 29% feel neutral over them. That is a marked decrease as of January 2019, the last time NBC News asked the question, when 63% of adults had positive opinions of federal employees. But current numbers are also slightly above the measurements in February 2011, when 42% of adults felt positively towards federal workers.
When they were asked to reflect on Doge, one third of the voters said that Musk and Doge’s efforts to reduce the expenditure and size of the federal government “should continue much more that should be done.” Another 28% say: “It is necessary but it must reduce the speed to evaluate the impact.” And another 33% say “is reckless and should stop now before it becomes more damage.”
Only 4% say “there is no need to reduce the size of the federal government and its expenses.”
Hart Cardona-Arroyo’s Democratic Surveyor of Hart Research Associates told NBC News that when voters have that ability to express nuances, “we begin to see many people in that soft medium.” The firm conducted the survey with public opinion strategies, a republican voting firm.
“He tells us that many people are willing to give Doge the benefit of the doubt,” said Cardona-Arroyo, but “for most voters, they want things to reduce speed and reevalue it, or think that perhaps things are, a little, in the wrong direction.”
That skepticism or direct rejection of Doge’s efforts also occur when 27% of respondents say that they know “have been negatively affected by reductions or cuts to federal benefits, programs or services as a result of the changes promulgated by Doge.” That group is very concentrated among self -identified Democrats, but geographically, it extends relatively throughout the country.
Some of the negative impacts were direct, according to a handful of literal responses of the respondents. One cited a niece in a non -profit organization that lost their subsidy money, another child who works in the Department of Education, and others mentioned federal government employees who are at risk or lost their jobs.
“I know that federal workers and the projects in which they worked for years were reduced, and were for the benefit of the American people,” said a New Jersey woman who works in the local government and does not identify with any of the important parties.
Other respondents raised nonspecific concerns about future uncertainty for them or their loved ones. And some who responded that if they felt a negative impact they combined Doge’s first cuts with the concerns that Congress Republicans could cut Medicaid’s eyes or other programs on their draft Law on Future Budget.
The fourteen percent of the voters say that they or someone they know is a federal employee who has been fired as a result of the changes promulgated by Doge.
The NBC News survey surveyed 1,000 registered voters from March 7 through a combination of telephone interviews and an online survey sent by text message. The margin of error is more or less 3.1 percentage points.
