Democrats are facing a challenge in their opposition to President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal budget cuts; a majority of them subtly “approve” what the Department of Government Efficiency is doing, just not its involvement with billionaire Elon Musk.
Since DOGE’s office was officially formed on January 20, the left-wing aligned leaders have been publicly bashing its cutting costs measures as “reckless and harmful.” Yet, internal discussions among liberals reveal that attacking the government expenditure watchdog may not be as politically-backed as they had anticipated.
Last month, at a retreat hosted by the centrist group Third Way in Loudoun County, Virginia, moderate Democrats acknowledged the party is associated with excessive bureaucracy and inefficient government spending, a position that could weaken their argument against DOGE.
Opinion poll: Democrats might be supportive of DOGE
According to a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Saturday, 51 percent of respondents generally approve of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut staff at federal agencies, including USAID. The opinion survey also revealed that 74% of American citizens want DOGE to continue cutting down federal spending.
Everything the Democrats do is staged. Over 70% of Americans support the work DOGE is doing. pic.twitter.com/5MF4vWLbNo
— Mr.Marshall (@MistaMarshall00) March 3, 2025
Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at the progressive group The Hub Project, said that simply attacking DOGE as a defense of government workers could backfire. “We don’t need to say we’re saving the federal bureaucracy,” she reckoned. “We need to focus on the people, on the devastating impacts on society and some of the most vulnerable populations.”
The biggest problem liberals seem to have with the US government department is the involvement of Elon Musk. Democratic polling conducted by The Hub Project and Navigator Research found that the public views DOGE more favorably when it is not explicitly linked to the billionaire entrepreneur.
Without Musk’s name, respondents viewed the agency favorably by a four-point margin. But when it is identified as the “first buddy’s” initiative, its favorability rating dropped to 37 percent. The Tesla CEO hasn’t been in the dems’ good graces, and has said several times on social platform X that they are scared of “what DOGE will find.”
The REAL reason so many Democrats are upset about entitlements (social security, medical, etc) fraud investigations is that they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters.
That’s what it’s all about.
Truth.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
Still, Russell warned that relying too heavily on Musk as a point of argument could be a mistake. “Focusing solely on Musk as the villain is not going to be sustainable for us,” she continued. “We have to connect the dots here for voters on why they’re taking stuff away from Americans, and that’s because they’re giving billionaires a tax cut.”
GOP leaders count DOGE as a winning issue
A recent survey conducted between Feb. 21-24 among 911 likely Michigan Republican Senate primary voters found that government corruption and DOGE ranked as the most important issue for 55 percent of respondents, ahead of problems seen in the US economy, which came in second at 22 percent.
Owing to the poll results, Republican strategists now see an opportunity to rally support around government efficiency. One GOP consultant working in battleground states likened the positive feel behind DOGE to Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to build a wall on the southern border. “DOGE is today what the wall was in ‘16,” the consultant said.
Matt Bennett, the Third Way retreat’s co-founder, suggested that if the meeting had taken place more recently, DOGE would have been a much bigger topic of discussion. He propounded that voters do want change but prefer a more measured approach rather than the sweeping cuts proposed by Trump. “Not the chainsaw, but more of the scalpel,” he surmised.
On February 26, after House Republicans narrowly voted for a $4.5 trillion tax break and $2 trillion budgetary cuts, left-aligned US Representative Nancy Pelosi beckoned that GOP leaders had passed a budget that “steals taxpayer dollars from Medicaid” to “give tax breaks to their donors and big corporations.”
Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, supported this sentiment, arguing that Americans are not opposed to budget cuts in principle but object to those they see as reckless. “The idea of cuts is not what people object to,” she said. “They object to them being blunt and reckless.”
But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick clapped back at the politician and businesswoman, saying: “We do not need to cut a single dollar from someone in social security or someone from Medicaid or someone in the government who actually deserves the money. What we’re going to attack is the waste, fraud, and abuse.”
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/dems-confront-a-new-doge-reality-more-famous/