Fact Check: Claims that 81% of people approve of DOGE stem from unreliable online poll
Claim:
In March 2025, a poll showed 81% of people approved of tech magnate Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Rating:
What's True:
Elon Musk posted a poll on X in March 2025 in which 81.1% of the more than 1.5 million respondents answered "yes" or "super yes" to the question "Do you support @DOGE reducing government waste & fraud." However …
What's False:
… online polls are notoriously unreliable. Musk posted the poll the day after the publication of an Axios-Generation Lab youth poll. Conducted among people ages 18 to 34, it revealed that 68% of those who leaned Republican approved of DOGE, while only 9% of Democrats and 29% of independents thought the initiative was doing a good job. Overall, 71% said they strongly or somewhat disapproved of its work. Meanwhile, 81% of Republicans "strongly or somewhat approved" of U.S. President Donald Trump.
In March 2025, a rumor began to spread that a poll had shown 81% of people approved of tech magnate Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, which U.S. President Donald Trump created on his first day in office. DOGE's stated mission has been to cut spending in government.
The rumor appeared on several social media websites in mid-April 2025, such as X (archived):
(X / @CRRJA5)
"WOW!" the image in the post read. "Despite what the media says Elon Musks Poll showed 81% of people support the DOGE team!" As of this writing, the X post had more than 526,000 views, 13,000 likes and 2,800 shares. Musk himself reposted it (archived), contributing to its popularity.
This wasn't the first time the claim of DOGE's popularity had circulated. On March 8, 2025, an X user posted an AI-generated image of Musk with poll results (archived). The same image also appeared on Facebook.
Musk had indeed posted a poll on X on March 7, 2025, with the question "Do you support @DOGE reducing government waste & fraud." Of the more than 1.5 million respondents, 81.1% said "yes" or "super yes" (archived):
However, online polls are notoriously unreliable, with sample selection as the main culprit. In this case, fans of Musk who follow him closely on X are the most likely to respond to one of his polls, all but guaranteeing that the result will be positive for him. This is known as self-selection bias. In traditional polling, pollsters often select respondents in a more sophisticated way, weighing their samples by demographic categories (such as age, gender, race).
Because the poll's results matched the claim but were not reliable, we've rated this claim a mixture of truth and falsehood.
Musk posted his poll the day after the publication of an Axios-Generation Lab poll that painted a different picture. Conducted among people 18 to 34 years old, it revealed that 68% of those who leaned Republican approved of DOGE, while only 9% of Democrats and 29% of independents thought the initiative was doing a good job. Overall, 71% said they strongly or somewhat disapproved of DOGE's work. Meanwhile, 81% of those who identified as Republicans "strongly or somewhat approved" of Trump.
Cohn, Nate. 'The Problem With a Crowd of New Online Polls'. The New York Times, 27 Sept. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/upshot/online-polls-election.html. https://archive.is/3JvO5.
'How Do Political Polls Work?' Caltech Science Exchange, http://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/voting-elections/political-polls-science. Accessed 21 Apr. 2025.
Olsen, Randall. 'Self-Selection Bias'. Sage, https://methods.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/encyclopedia-of-survey-research-methods/chpt/selfselection-bias. Accessed 21 Apr. 2025.
Pandey, Erica. 'Exclusive Poll: Young Americans down on DOGE'. Axios, 6 Mar. 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/poll-gen-z-millennials-doge-trump-approval.
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