WASHINGTON — Americans may have recently elected Donald Trump to a second term, but that doesn’t mean they have high confidence in his ability to choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet — or effectively manage government spending, the military and the White House, according to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
As Trump names his appointees for key posts in his administration — some of whom could face difficult confirmation fights in the Senate even with Republicans in control — about half of U.S. adults are “not at all confident” in Trump’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and other high-level government positions.
The appointment process and its breakneck speed have represented a manifestation of Trump’s pledge to voters to be a disruptive force in the country and a return to the chaotic era of governance that defined his first four years in the Oval Office. But only around 3 in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” confident that Trump will pick qualified people to serve in his administration. A majority of Republicans say they do have high confidence.
Trump has promised to shake up Washington with an aggressive approach that includes the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nongovernmental task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, to be helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Beyond his appointments, though, the survey finds a similar level of confidence in Trump’s ability to manage government spending and perform other key presidential tasks, including overseeing the military and the White House — which, in Trump’s first term, experienced significant high-level staff turnover, particularly in its early days.
That’s not quite the same challenge faced four years ago by President Joe Biden, who came into office with higher levels of confidence in some areas than others.
That low confidence is generally driven by Democrats and independents. A large share of Democrats are suspicious of Trump’s abilities on all of these fronts — about three-quarters say they are “not at all confident” that he will be able to effectively manage the White House, government spending or the military, or choose well-qualified people for his Cabinet.
About 4 in 10 independents, meanwhile, say they are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in Trump’s capacity to execute each of these responsibilities, while about 2 in 10 are “extremely” or “very” confident.
Confidence among Republicans is higher, but not as overwhelming as Democrats’ doubts. About 6 in 10 Republicans are “extremely” or “very” confident in Trump’s ability to choose well-qualified people to serve in his Cabinet and manage the White House, the military and government spending. About 2 in 10 Republicans are “moderately confident,” and another 2 in 10 are “slightly” or “not at all” confident in each case.
When Biden took office in 2021, people also harbored some doubts about how he’d carry out some major responsibilities — but unlike with Trump, where concern is fairly even across different tasks, they were more confident in Biden’s ability to do some things than others. When he entered the White House, Biden had served eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president, as well as decades in the U.S. Senate, and he ran the 2020 campaign largely on those years of experience.
A separate AP-NORC poll conducted shortly after Biden took office — which asked the question slightly differently — found a higher level of confidence in Biden’s ability to appoint well-qualified people for his Cabinet and manage the White House than his ability to manage the military and government spending.
___
The 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.