President Trump’s outside-the-box Department of Government Efficiency hasn’t even been officially established, but it’s already off to a strong start. On Wednesday, co-leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy published a piece in The Wall Street Journal laying out their vision for significant changes, and later that same day we received evidence of strong public support for their effort in the form of survey results showing that large majorities of the American public support the creation of the department and also support them using one of the tools they plan to use to achieve efficiency – the termination of federal employees who fail to return to the office.
The survey was conducted two days after Election Day for Tea Party Patriots Action by pollster John McLaughlin, who also polls for President Trump. With a survey sample of 1,000 general election voters, the survey had a margin of error of +/- 3.1% at the 95 percent confidence interval.
Confident that Trump would win and be in position to implement his second-term agenda, we wanted to ask two simple questions that no one, to our knowledge, had yet asked: First, is there public support for the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency, and second, does the public support a proposal to require government employees to go back to their offices to work or fire them if they refuse to do so?
The survey results are conclusive – by strong margins, voters support both.
Asked, “Do you support or oppose a department of government efficiency whose sole purpose is to audit the government for inefficiencies and to instruct Congress on adjusting the federal budget to reduce costs and eliminate redundancy, unnecessary programs, and unnecessary services?”, 71 percent say they support the idea, with 40 percent saying they “strongly” support it and 31 percent saying they “somewhat” support it, against just 10 percent who say they “somewhat” oppose it and 6 percent who say they “strongly” oppose it.
Support for the establishment of the DOGE is bipartisan, too – 79 percent of Republicans support it, 68 percent of Independents support it, and even 64 percent of Democrats support it. Not surprisingly, Trump voters support it most strongly of all – fully 79 percent, four out of five, support the creation of DOGE.
Supporting the creation of the new department and its effort to shrink the size and scope of government is one thing, but what about the tactics its leaders will use to achieve its ends? It’s one thing to speak in the abstract about shrinking government, but it’s quite another to get down to the details. Does the public actually support firing government workers if they won’t do the simple act of coming back to work in their offices?
Yes, it turns out, the public supports that, too. We wanted to make sure survey respondents understood the full context of the question, so – to our pollster’s delight – we asked a medium-length question, with a very long introduction: “We are now more than four years from the height of the COVID pandemic, and America’s largest companies, including Apple, Google, and Starbucks, have insisted their employees return to the office to work. Small companies like local gas stations and restaurants also have employees working in person. 2.87 million civilians work in the federal government, yet 50 percent of those employees have yet to return to the office. These federal employees decide how tax dollars are spent and how government programs are implemented, and they are supposed to ensure those programs run efficiently. Yet, with no in-person office presence, the employees lack accountability. Do you support or oppose a proposal to force government employees back to their offices or fire them if they refuse to do so?”
Fully 65 percent of those surveyed say they support the proposal, with 37 percent saying they “strongly” support it and 29 percent saying they “somewhat” support it, against 12 percent who “somewhat” oppose it and 12 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Not surprisingly, 76 percent of Republicans and 655 of Independents support it. And even Democrats, a solid majority – 55 percent – support it.
This is crucial to the success of the exercise. As Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in their Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.” They’re right, of course, it’s just that simple, and the public agrees. And as they pointed out, the new work condition (actually, prior to Covid, a work condition none of us even would have thought of as a “condition,” because we all would have naturally assumed that government workers would work in their offices as a matter of course) could result in a form of “self-selection” for reductions in force – a “wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” as they put it.
The second Trump Administration hasn’t even started yet, and it’s already making progress. That’s an excellent start to Thanksgiving Week.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action
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