ATLANTA — Good-government advocates, anti-tax conservatives, politicians of various stripes and everyday Americans grouse about “waste, fraud and abuse” across the U.S. government.

President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, opened the latest chapter for a phrase hailed as common sense and derided as propaganda.

“It’s a very broad idea,” said Matt Weidinger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But this phrase ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ obviously means different things to different people.”

Here is a look at this rhetorical cudgel and how it relates to the outset of Trump’s second administration.

Pinpointing the genesis of “waste, fraud and abuse” as political rhetoric is difficult. But the concept and resulting battles are older than the nation: Think “taxation without representation” and the break from Great Britain.

After winning independence, the early American republic reprised the arguments.

Two generations fought over Alexander Hamilton’s national bank — a philosophical forerunner to everything from the Federal Reserve system to Small Business Administration loans, federally backed mortgage securities and bank deposit insurance.

Trump’s populist hero, Andrew Jackson, cast the Second National Bank as a sop to its wealthy stockholders. “There are no necessary evils in government,” the seventh president wrote in one veto message. “Its evils exist only in its abuses.”

Many of Jackson’s fellow Southerners opposed the related “internal improvements” of Henry Clay’s American System. The enslaving planter class viewed the spending for roads, bridges and navigable waterways — long before Washington had “infrastructure weeks” — as an unconstitutional federal overreach that transferred their wealth indirectly to factory owners, bankers and shipping magnates in more industrialized northern states.

Ronald Reagan cemented modern conservatives’ approach in his first inaugural address. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he said in 1981. “Government is the problem.”

He railed against “the welfare queen” as the public face of an inefficient social safety net and unaccountable federal government. Reagan based the attack, which critics lambasted as a racist trope, on one woman’s criminal fraud case for getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in assistance.

In a forerunner to DOGE, Reagan impaneled a group of private sector CEOs to identify waste. The “Grace Commission,” colloquially named for its chairman, businessman J. Peter Grace, moved more deliberately than DOGE, and its recommendations were not implemented on a broad scale. Reagan and Congress did raise the retirement age for Social Security eligibility.

The federal government spent about $6.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023.

The libertarian Cato Institute counts the biggest-ticket items this way: $3.19 trillion in transfer payments; $1.15 trillion in aid to states; $950 billion in interest payments on national debt; $840 billion in purchases of goods and services; and $560 billion to pay federal workers.

Social Security and Medicare comprise most of Cato’s transfer category, along with programs like food assistance and the earned income tax credit for low-income households. Medicaid accounts for most state aid, which also includes education, transportation and other infrastructure.

The issue for Musk, or perhaps for Trump and Republican majorities in Congress, is that Americans hold conflicting views about the details.

March 2023 polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 6 in 10 U.S. adults said the U.S. government was spending “too much” overall. Yet an AP-NORC poll taken in January 2025 found that about two-thirds of American adults say the U.S. government is spending “too little” on Social Security and education. About 6 and 10 said the same about Medicare, the government health insurance program for older Americans, and assistance to poor Americans.

Most adults also say Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poorest working-age Americans and low-income children, is underfunded. Medicare and Medicaid payments do not go directly to patients but to health care providers — physicians, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies and medical supply firms in communities across the country.

The Government Accountability Office and other agencies produce regular reports identifying inefficiencies and other problems. The GAO said in 2024 that its enacted recommendations have saved about $667 billion since 2011.

Vivek Ramaswamy, another Trump ally initially involved with DOGE, seized on hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts and programs that Congress may not have reauthorized explicitly. Yet contrary to Ramaswamy’s characterization, most are ongoing programs from veterans medical care to NASA functions.

Trump has not addressed another pool of potential money: the so-called “tax gap.” That’s not about the Republican vs. Democratic debate over rates and loopholes. It’s the estimated gap between what the federal government should collect under existing law and what actually gets paid on time. Like “improper payments,” it’s a mix of clerical error and intentional fraud.

The IRS estimate for the 2022 tax year: $696 billion.

Other government reports identify “improper payments” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance — that total several hundred billion in typical years.

Weidinger, the AEI budget expert, said that includes some fraudulent spending but is mostly overpayments or payments that require more documentation. Mistakes could include a Social Security payment a month after a recipient has died, a government miscalculation of someone’s benefit, someone getting one unemployment check after getting a new job or an insufficiently documented claim from a health care provider.

But Weidinger also noted that special government programs, such as unemployment during the COVID pandemic, carried a much higher rate of outright fraud — identity thieves, including from foreign nations, gaming the system to get money.

“We won’t ever recover all of that,” he said.

And, he added, the government’s estimates of fraud and improper payments are probably too low even if they almost certainly do not reach the levels of savings Musk and Trump have promised.

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WASHINGTON — As Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Americans have a dimmer view of his presidency than they did at the end of Donald Trump’s first term or Barack Obama’s second, a new poll finds.

Around one-quarter of U.S. adults said Biden was a “good” or “great” president, with less than 1 in 10 saying he was “great,” according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

It’s a stark illustration of how tarnished Biden’s legacy has become, with many members of his own party seeing his Democratic presidency as merely mediocre. About one-third described Trump as “good” or “great” on the eve of the Republican’s departure from the White House in 2021, according to AP-NORC polling, including about 2 in 10 who said he was “great” — even after he helped sparked a deadly insurrection that saw a mob of his supporters overrun the U.S. Capitol. Americans were similarly likely to describe both Biden and Trump as “poor” or “terrible” — about half said this characterized each president’s time in office — but about 3 in 10 said Biden was “average,” while less than 2 in 10 said this about Trump.

Biden’s standing is also much lower than the last outgoing Democratic president, Obama, who left office with about half of Americans describing his tenure as “good” or “great,” according to another AP-NORC poll.

Those findings are consistent with data released this week by Gallup, which found Biden’s standing similar to that of President Richard Nixon after the Republican resigned during the Watergate scandal. The Gallup analysis found that other presidents who left with poor ratings — including Trump, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter — saw views of their presidencies grow warmer with time. But for now, few seem impressed with Biden’s time in office, including a sizable chunk of Democrats.

“I’m not going to sound like ‘Star Wars,’ that he went over to the dark side and everything that might be implied there,” John Cressey, a 79-year-old Democrat who lives in the Los Angeles area and does background work for films and movies, said of Biden. “But I think he just lost the pulse of the nation and that’s why Trump won.”

Among supporters of Biden’s party, only about 1 in 10 described his presidency as “great,” while about 4 in 10 called it “good,” and a similar share described it as “average.”

Cressey said he saw the 82-year-old Biden declining physically and believes the president was increasingly controlled by aides. He says Biden let the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border deteriorate into “a mess.” And Cressey summed up his chagrin with Biden’s handling of the economy by saying, “Go buy a carton of eggs.”

Things weren’t always so bad for Biden. About 6 in 10 Americans approved of the way he handled the presidency as he took office, according to AP-NORC polling, but by early 2022, that had fallen to about 4 in 10, where views largely stayed for the remainder of his term.

In the new poll, disappointment was especially palpable among Black and Hispanic Americans, who have traditionally leaned Democratic but shifted in larger numbers toward Trump in 2024.

The contrast with Obama was especially striking among Black Americans. About 6 in 10 said Obama, the nation’s only Black president, had kept his promises at the end of his term, compared with around 3 in 10 who said the same for Biden. Similarly, about 7 in 10 Black Americans said they and their family were better off at the end of Obama’s presidency while only about a third said that about Biden.

“I feel as though the economy hasn’t progressed in a positive way since he’s been in office,” said Evonte Terrell, 30, a sales manager at a telecommunications company from Detroit who described himself as a “waning Democrat.”

Terrell, who is Black, said the party has become too focused on things like climate change and war while de-emphasizing rebuilding communities and helping the poor. He also bristled at Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter, saying that, “as a father, I would do the same” but “not everyone is going to have that capability.”

Younger people were particularly likely to have a negative view of Biden’s presidency. Only about 1 in 10 Americans under age 30 say he was a “good” or “great” president, compared with about 4 in 10 ages 60 or older. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans ages 18 to 29 say Biden was a “poor” or “terrible” president.

Terrell, facing student loan payments, also pointed to Biden’s efforts to ease educational debt that were struck down by the Supreme Court. He said that amounted to years of “just deferring” when “otherwise I could have been paying it off this entire time.”

The Biden administration helped oversee the passage of more large-scale legislation than did Trump or Obama — including on public works, microchip production and health care and promoting green jobs. The president also signed the first major gun safety package in decades.

Still, only about 2 in 10 Americans said the president made good on his campaign trail pledges. About 4 in 10 said he tried but failed to keep his promises, and a similar share said he has not kept his promises.

Mark Jeanmougin, 47, who is from Cincinnati and works in cybersecurity, voted for Trump in 2016 but backed Biden in 2020 and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

He sees Biden as a good president who set the United States up for success on issues like climate change while delivering badly needed infrastructure funding. But, he said, Biden “definitely ran into some activist judges who were saying no to some of his policies.”

Jeanmougin said Biden helped improve the post-COVID-19 economy and rising inflation was an expected consequence.

“A hard landing, lots of unemployment, or a soft landing with inflation,” he said. “We knew that was what was going to happen. So the idea that so many of my fellow citizens were unaware or didn’t know is really hard.”

In all, about half of Democrats said Biden tried and failed to keep his campaign promises, while about 4 in 10 said he succeeded.

For the most part, Americans don’t think Biden is leaving the country in a better position than when he took office four years ago — with a few exceptions.

On the issues of creating jobs and prescription drug costs, Americans were about as likely to say Biden had a positive impact as they were to say he’d had a negative impact. A similar share said he had no impact.

But many thought he’d done more harm than good in other key areas. At least half of Americans said Biden had a negative impact on the cost of living, immigration and the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians — compared with about 2 in 10 who said he had a positive impact in each of these arenas.

He was also perceived as having more of a negative impact than a positive one on Russia’s war with Ukraine, despite his administration pushing for billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv. The negative views toward Biden regarding Israel’s war against Hamas were particularly pronounced among younger voters, with slightly less than 1 in 10 Americans under age 30 saying he had a positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

About 4 in 10 Americans said they and their families are somewhat or much worse off than they were when Biden became president, while about one-quarter said they are much or somewhat better off.

Only about one-quarter said they and their families were worse off at the end of either Trump’s or Obama’s presidency.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

BERLIN — Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk caused uproar after backing Germany’s far-right party in a major newspaper ahead of key parliamentary elections in the Western European country, leading to the resignation of the paper’s opinion editor in protest.

Germany is to vote in an early election on Feb. 23 after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party governing coalition collapsed last month in a dispute over how to revitalize the country’s stagnant economy.

Musk’s guest opinion piece for Welt am Sonntag —a sister publication of POLITICO owned by the Axel Springer Group — published in German over the weekend, was the second time this month he supported the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

“The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the last spark of hope for this country,” Musk wrote in his translated commentary.

He went on to say the far-right party “can lead the country into a future where economic prosperity, cultural integrity and technological innovation are not just wishes, but reality.”

The Tesla Motors CEO also wrote that his investment in Germany gave him the right to comment on the country’s condition.

The AfD is polling strongly, but its candidate for the top job, Alice Weidel, has no realistic chance of becoming chancellor because other parties refuse to work with the far-right party.

An ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, the technology billionaire challenged in his opinion piece the party’s public image.

“The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”

Musk’s commentary has led to a debate in German media over the boundaries of free speech, with the paper’s own opinion editor announcing her resignation, pointedly on Musk’s social media platform, X.

“I always enjoyed leading the opinion section of WELT and WAMS. Today an article by Elon Musk appeared in Welt am Sonntag. I handed in my resignation yesterday after it went to print,” Eva Marie Kogel wrote.

A critical article by the future editor-in-chief of the Welt group, Jan Philipp Burgard, accompanied Musk’s opinion piece.

“Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach, that only the AfD can save Germany, is fatally wrong,” Burgard wrote.

Responding to a request for comment from the German Press Agency, dpa, the current editor-in-chief of the Welt group, Ulf Poschardt, and Burgard — who is due to take over on Jan. 1 — said in a joint statement that the discussion over Musk’s piece was “very insightful. Democracy and journalism thrive on freedom of expression.”

“This will continue to determine the compass of the “world” in the future. We will develop “Die Welt” even more decisively as a forum for such debates,” they wrote to dpa.

WASHINGTON — The kids seen by Dolores Mejia around suburban Phoenix have been growing heavier in recent years. Their parents, too, she says.

Mejia, a 75-year-old retiree, says she’s also had her own weight struggles on the scale.

That’s why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as he campaigned alongside Donald Trump caught her attention. She liked the questions Kennedy raised about the role of processed foods in America’s obesity epidemic.

“I’m a junk food person,” said Mejia, an ardent Trump supporter. “I started wondering where those extra pounds came from.”

After hearing Kennedy out, she concluded: “We cannot trust the health organizations we’ve trusted for years to tell us that our foods are safe.”

Republicans such as Mejia have embraced Kennedy, whose alliance with the president-elect could make the prominent environmentalist and vaccine skeptic the nation’s top health official next year. Republicans hold an overwhelmingly positive view of Kennedy, with most approving of Trump’s decision to put him in his administration, according to recent polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters in the 2024 presidential election.

But Americans overall are less positive about Kennedy, and there isn’t broad support for some of his views, which include closer scrutiny of vaccines.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy will be charged with leading the Department of Health and Human Services, a $1.7 trillion agency that researches cancer, approves prescription drugs and provides health insurance for roughly half the country.

About 6 in 10 Republicans approve of Kennedy’s appointment to Trump’s Cabinet and only about 1 in 10 disapprove, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in December, while the rest aren’t familiar with him or didn’t have an opinion.

Kennedy’s talk of healthy foods is what captured the attention of Natalie Moralez, a 32-year-old engineer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who identifies as an independent.

She likes his promises to take on powerful companies. And she’s eager to see him challenge the ingredients they use in the food she finds on supermarket shelves.

“Even just buying foods from the grocery store, like what else is in there?” Moralez said. “That’s my main concern, and hopefully he can figure out what the underlying issues are and see if we can do better.”

Kennedy doesn’t fare as well among Americans overall, with about 4 in 10 U.S. adults disapproving and about 3 in 10 approving of his appointment.

Although Kennedy is a member of one of the most powerful Democratic dynasties in the country, most Democrats said they don’t like that he’s been named to Trump’s Cabinet. About 6 in 10 Democrats “strongly disapprove” of the pick, the December poll found. That’s a higher share of disapproval than other high-profile picks such as Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary or Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

Kennedy started his career as an environmental lawyer and won big lawsuits against companies over the chemicals used in weed killers and heavy metal smelters.

But in recent years, he’s attracted a sizable and loyal following over his claims that vaccines, recommended and championed by the nation’s public health agencies, are dangerous. That’s despite decades of research, laboratory testing and real-world use that shows childhood vaccinations have prevented millions of deaths.

“There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” Kennedy said on a podcast in July 2023. During a Fox News interview the same year, he said he believes a repeatedly discredited idea that vaccines can cause autism. In recent days, Trump has increasingly suggested that the link between autism and vaccines should be studied — although decades of research has already concluded there is no connection between the two.

Trump and Kennedy allies have promised not to take away vaccines, instead saying they oppose government mandates and want to conduct more research on the vaccines.

But about half of voters want the government to be more involved in ensuring children are vaccinated for childhood diseases, according to AP VoteCast.

About one-quarter said the government’s current involvement on this is “about right,” and only about 2 in 10 wanted the government to be less involved. But parents of school-age children were somewhat more likely to support a smaller government role: Roughly 3 in 10 parents of children under 18 wanted the government less involved, compared with about 2 in 10 voters without children under 18.

Among Trump’s voters, about one-third wanted the government less involved in ensuring children are vaccinated for childhood diseases.

A similar share wanted the government more involved, and about 3 in 10 said its involvement was about right. Roughly 4 in 10 Trump voters who are parents of children under 18 said they want the government less involved in ensuring children are vaccinated, while about one-third said they wanted it more involved.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them the AP, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.

People who voted in the presidential race this November held divided views on Kennedy, according to AP VoteCast.

Kennedy had dropped out of the presidential race by that point, throwing his support behind Trump, but remained on the ballot in some states.

About 4 in 10 voters had a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Kennedy, and roughly 4 in 10 had a very or somewhat unfavorable view. Slightly more than 1 in 10 did not know enough about Kennedy to have an opinion.

Republican voters — about two-thirds — were more likely to hold a favorable view of Kennedy, much higher than the roughly 2 in 10 Democrats who viewed him positively. Meanwhile, about 7 in 10 Democrats had a negative opinion of Kennedy, with about half saying they had a “very unfavorable” view.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

AP VoteCast was a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The survey of more than 120,000 voters was conducted for eight days, concluding as polls closed. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters overall is estimated to be plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at https://ap.org/votecast.