Most Americans think it would be “too risky” to expand the White House’s power, including for newly re-elected President Trump, according to a new poll.
The Pew Research Center survey, which was conducted during the second week of Trump’s second term, found that 65 percent of respondents who were asked specifically about the current leadership said “it would be too risky to give Trump more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems,” while 78 percent said that shifting more power to any U.S. president would be “too risky,” when asked more generally.
Views on the scope of Trump’s authority, in particular, were divided along party lines: 90 percent of respondents who self-identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic said that it would be too dicey to give him more power, while 59 percent of respondents who identified as Republicans or leaning Republican said Trump could more easily tackle the nation’s problems with more power.
The query over presidential power comes amid criticism of potential overreach and multiple lawsuits in response to Trump’s push to quickly root out government waste through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and related government program cuts. The Pew survey was conducted Jan. 27-Feb. 2 — before some of the administration’s more recent executive actions.
Trump signed an executive order last week that demands federal agencies work with DOGE to make “large-scale” cuts to the federal workforce.
Trump signed another executive order Tuesday aiming to expand the White House’s authority over some independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
About a third of the Pew survey respondents overall indicated they support giving Trump, specifically, more authority and agreed that “many of the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if Trump didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.”
Similar surveys Pew conducted dating back to the Obama administration have found that most voters think that it would be dangerous to expand presidential authority, regardless of who is in office.
Those whose party controlled the White House tended to support more power for the presidency, however.
In 2016, 82 percent of Republican respondents said it would be too risky to expand the president’s authority during President Obama’s final year in office, while 66 percent of Democrats agreed during that survey.
A year later, during Trump’s first year of his first term, the number dropped to 60 percent of Republicans who said that it would be “too risky” to expand any U.S. president’s ability to act without support from Congress and the courts. Seventy-two percent of Democrats agreed.
