We asked pollster John McLaughlin to pose this question in his latest 1,000-person poll.

How much of the federal budget is wasted?

The chart below shows that the mean answer was 38 cents of every dollar spent by Uncle Sam is wasted:

This means that on average, Americans think we could eliminate about $2.5 trillion in wasteful spending. And Elon is proving to be the perfect efficiency czar to find it.

In the poll we sponsored, we also found that almost 2-in-3 voters say the federal government is too wasteful and inefficient, compared to 1-in-4 who say the government does a better job than people give it credit for: 64% – 25%.