Pretty clear a large portion of Americans want smaller government. But they also want the benefits (sometimes only for themselves) that comes with a larger government (and spending).
A large portion of the electorate do not have an accurate sense of how big the government is or what it spends money on. DOGE is a living example. They believed (and musk boasted) they'd find trillions in wasted money. I think a lot of people just believe this must be true because they've heard stories in the past. In fact, DOGE found zero waste. Programs they cut were programs they just didn't like. And they fell short of their goals by multiple orders of magnitude. And are now rolling back some of those cuts because they were either illegal or hastily done. The bulk of federal spending goes straight back to constituents in the form of entitlements or to the military or to debt service. Discretionary spending is a fraction of total spending and covers hundreds of vital services. IGs already look for fraud which is pretty rare.
It's all about how you ask the question; there would be a lot of people who want a thing _called_ small government, because they have been told that that is a good thing, but the _benefits_ of big government (ideally without the _costs_ of big government, but realistically most people in the US do not care about the deficit; if they did Trump would already have been deposed).
