President Donald Trump’s second term has been dominated by his attempts to pare down the size of government, with the White House DOGE office taking the lead in his efforts to root out inefficiencies within federal agencies.
New polling shows that most Americans don’t think government waste has declined since January.
In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos survey, conducted from April 18 through April 22, 43% of US adults said government waste had decreased since January. But when combined, a majority of respondents said waste had either increased (25%) or remained the same (31%) since Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
Regarding government fraud, only 32% of respondents said it had lessened since January, while 34% felt that fraud had gone up and 34% said fraud had largely been unchanged.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been the de facto face of the “Department of Government Efficiency” — as it is largely known to the public — since the beginning of the year.
In recent months, though, DOGE-initiated terminations of federal employees and the group’s attempts to gain access to sensitive files on taxpayers have raised alarms among many voters, with Trump seeing his job approval rating slide to 39% in the Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll as his 100-day mark approaches on April 30.
Musk recently said DOGE hoped to secure $150 billion in savings for the current fiscal year, a figure far below the rosier $2 trillion estimate that he previously hoped to cut from the federal budget.
The tech titan has himself become a much more polarizing figure since the onset of Trump’s second term.
In the Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos survey, Musk had a 57% disapproval rating among US adults regarding his work with the administration, with 35% of respondents approving of how he’s handled his role. It’s a slide from February, when 34% of adults approved of Musk’s performance and 49% of respondents expressed disapproval.
Since the onset of Trump’s second term, Musk has defended DOGE’s cuts across agencies and departments, and he’s taken a leading role in targeting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which have been dramatically scaled down by the White House DOGE office.
In recent weeks, Musk has faced increasingly vocal protests over his work with DOGE, and he announced earlier in April that he’d be stepping back from his role in Washington in the coming weeks to turn his attention back to Tesla, which saw a significant first-quarter sales dip compared to last year.
The White House and DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Business Insider.
