FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk walks on Capitol Hill on the day of a meeting with Senate Republican Leader-elect John Thune (R-SD), in Washington, U.S. December 5, 2024. / REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

 A majority of Americans worry that Elon Musk's drive to slash the federal government could hurt services their communities depend on and believe that billionaires have too much influence on President Donald Trump's administration, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Some 58 percent of respondents to the six-day survey completed on Feb. 19 said they were concerned that federal programs such as Social Security retirement payments and student aid could be delayed by Musk's campaign, double the 29 percent of respondents who said they did not worry about it.

Americans, including some of Trump's most ardent supporters, are nervous about the influence wealthy Americans are having on the White House after Trump stocked his cabinet and circle of advisers with corporate executives and billionaires. 

Among poll respondents, 71 percent agreed with a statement that the very wealthy have too much influence on the White House, and 69 percent said they think the wealthy are making money off their White House connections.

Even among Americans who said they strongly identify with the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement - the president's most ardent supporters who make up about a third of his party - some 44 percent thought the richest Americans were profiting from White House connections.

Musk, the world's wealthiest person, has been tapped by Trump to lead a cost-cutting effort named the Department of Government Efficiency, which has pushed out more than 10,000 government workers in the past two weeks in a fashion that Democrats and other critics have termed haphazard. 

Republicans are largely backing Musk's DOGE effort so far, but the rest of the country is less impressed.

Some 42 percent of respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll support Musk's taskforce for cutting government spending, compared with 53 percent who oppose the endeavor. The division cut cleanly across partisan lines.

A majority of respondents - 62 percent - rejected a statement that the president has the right to fire any federal employee who disagrees with the president, compared to 23 percent who said they agreed.

With those concerns comes a risk of political blowback if Trump and Musk are perceived as going too far, analysts say. Although Trump is barred from serving a third term by the U.S. Constitution, Republicans who control Congress will face voters next year.

POLITICAL RISKS

Trump, is “misreading, as politicians tend to do, the election,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. 

“The underlying support for this is mixed.”

Signs of soft support among voters for DOGE and Musk's approach to reducing the federal workforce are in contrast to White House statements that the cost-cutting effort has the support of the "vast majority of Americans." 

On Feb. 6, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Fox News described Musk's approach and DOGE as "a commonsense solution to fixing a decades-old problem of bloated bureaucracy, waste, fraud and abuse, and the vast majority of Americans support it."

The White House and Musk have assured the public that there will not be a large-scale disruption of services and that benefits will not be threatened.

And to be sure, the broad tenors of Trump's cost-cutting agenda are relatively popular, while the president himself continues to hold a somewhat steady approval rating.

Some 59 percent of respondents in the poll backed the goal of downsizing the federal government, including about a third of self-identified Democrats, most independents and almost all Republicans. About one in five Democrats and almost all Republicans back cutting U.S. aid to foreign countries.

"If DOGE successfully saves taxpayers money without significantly cutting things they care about, this will be a political winner for the Republicans," said Anthony Fowler, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. "Of course, government employees who lose their jobs will be upset, but the median voter would like to see the government downsized, so if DOGE does its job well, it will be popular."    

Some of Trump's more radical proposed cuts appear to have little support outside his political base. Respondents opposed shuttering the Department of Education by roughly two to one - 65 percent to 30 percent, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found. 

Trump on Feb. 13 called the education department a "con job" that he would like to close "immediately." 

BAD OPTICS

Geer spoke about the image of Musk, the richest man in the world, holding court next to Trump in the Oval Office last week even as thousands of salaried government workers were being axed. 

“It’s terrible optics,” he said. 

But the real danger for Trump and his allies could lie down the road, Geer said.

“We haven’t seen it start to hurt yet, what happens when a disaster hits and [The Federal Emergency Management Agency] just can’t handle it? What happens when people stop getting their Social Security checks?” Geer said. “There are a lot of things government does that aren’t ideological.” 

Trump has stocked his cabinet with billionaires such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. 

Along with Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, his inauguration was attended by several members of the country’s corporate elite, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. 

Respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll held generally dour views on Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg but were unfamiliar with several other of the country's richest people. 

David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, said Trump, a wealthy former real estate developer, has erred in pivoting away from the image he projected during his first term in office, when he assumed more of a populist, anti-corporate posture.

“His magic was that he didn’t come across that he was ruling as a billionaire,” Pepper said. 

That has changed in this iteration of Trump’s administration, he said, where it’s clear that Trump is surrounding himself with corporate titans such as Musk.

"Donald Trump said the little guy was being screwed by the big players,” Pepper said. “Well, now the big players are firing the little guy.” 

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online and nationwide, surveyed 4,145 U.S. adults and its results had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.