February 21, 2025 10:52 AM UTC

Public Support For Trump, DOGE Damage Plunges In Latest Polling

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Washington Post leads off our look today at two new polls that suggest public support for Donald Trump and the sweeping cuts at federal agencies being carried out by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is precipitously declining as the consequences of the first traumatic month of Trump’s second term sink in:

President Donald Trump has opened his second term with a flurry of actions designed to radically disrupt and shrink the federal bureaucracy, but reviews from Americans are mixed to negative on many of his specific initiatives, and 57 percent say he has exceeded his authority since taking office, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Overall, 43 percent of Americans say they support what the president has done during his first month in office, with 48 percent saying they oppose. Those who strongly oppose outnumber those who strongly support by 37 percent to 27 percent…

Unsurprisingly the support versus opposition for Trump and DOGE is split starkly along partisan lines–but independent voters, who make up a plurality of Colorado’s electorate, are not happy with Trump’s first month back in office:

Almost 9 in 10 Republicans support his actions, while 9 in 10 Democrats oppose them. Among independents, about 1 in 3 support what he’s done, and half oppose. The remainder are unsure whether they support or oppose what is taking place.

Meanwhile, a new poll from CNN says Trump’s abandonment of his promise to reduce prices after years of inflation while recklessly firing thousands of federal workers has put a hard end to the honeymoon period he undeniably enjoyed after winning the election last November:

Most adults nationwide, 55%, say that Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems and 62% feel he has not gone far enough in trying to reduce the price of everyday goods. Sizable shares across party lines share the latter view, including 47% of Republicans, 65% of independents and 73% of Democrats. In CNN’s January polling, the economy eclipsed all other issues as Americans’ top concern.

More describe themselves as pessimistic or afraid when looking ahead to the rest of Trump’s second term (54%) than say they feel enthusiastic or optimistic about it (46%). In December, 52% were on the positive side, 48% negative. Notably, the share saying they feel “afraid” has climbed 6 points to 35%, rising by a roughly equal share across partisan lines. [Pols emphasis]

It’s important to remember how DOGE was sold to voters during the campaign–not as an executive agency with the power to immediately slash thousands of workers and, as Musk puts it, “delete whole agencies” like the U.S. Agency for International Development, but as an advisory body that would take almost two years to develop recommendations for reforms that Congress would vote on. That’s a longer way of saying that nobody in America voted for what’s happening, not even Trump’s slim popular vote plurality.

With no reason to believe that the DOGE culling of federal workers will end anytime soon, the economic and political damage from these job losses are only going to get worse. Here in Colorado, home to over 60,000 federal employees, every congressional district is set to feel the pain:

Especially Colorado’s military-dependent Fifth Congressional District represented by freshman Rep. Jeff Crank. But the fact is, federal workers are employed throughout the state, and these are jobs and incomes the loss of which will directly impact their communities. To the “Special Government Employees” of DOGE with their curious qualifications to recklessly fire federal workers, some of whom had to be sheepishly called back after someone explained they were working on important things like bird flu and nuclear security, these workers are just expenses. For everyone else, they are breadwinners and taxpayers like the rest of us–not to mention the important jobs they do that DOGE is disturbingly clueless about.

Trump’s stronger-than-expected victory last November is what emboldened him to unleash DOGE as an immediate job-killer instead of a commission to recommend longer-term changes to Congress. But what’s happening now is historic overreach with long-term political consequences not just for Trump, but for Republicans who fail to stand up to Trump at this crucial moment. Short of an abandonment of the whole DOGE cultural revolution, we don’t see how this polling trajectory is going to change. Trump 2.0 has peaked.

If anything, it’s all happening faster than we expected. Trump’s shocking overreach is prompting an equally rapid backlash that might otherwise have taken months to develop.