It’s not exactly news that Americans are mistrustful of their federal government. What you may have heard less about is that trust in some historically respected institutions has also taken a hit in the post-pandemic years.
Trust in scientists has ticked down, as has the share of Americans saying that science has a positive impact on society. Trust in education is sagging. And recent years have found a record-low share of Americans with a positive view of the Supreme Court.
In most cases, these changes in opinion have a partisan cast, with supporters of one major political party shifting their views even as the other keeps faith. In this way, the long-standing narrative of institutional mistrust is increasingly intertwined with the extreme political polarization that has defined the current era.
As we head toward the nation’s 250th anniversary, we’re handicapped in understanding the long arc of public trust in institutions by the fact that modern-day survey research didn’t come online until the mid-1930s. We do know that trust in the federal government to do the right thing topped 70% in the late 1950s, only to begin a sharp downward slide in the mid-1960s. That slide bottomed out at around 30% in the late 1970s. Measures of trust have bumped around a bit but never approached that original high point since.
Pew Research Center has been asking Americans about trust in institutions and reporting on their views for more than 25 years. Over the course of that period, some institutions have seen the faith entrusted in them wane, spike, and wane again. Others have managed to keep their hard-won credibility. Yet others tell a story of changing attitudes among subgroups of Americans.
Trust in the federal government
Americans’ trust in the federal government has been low for decades now.
After spiking in the moments of national solidarity that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, trust began to slide back down during President George W. Bush’s time in office and hasn’t recovered since then.
In a spring 2024 Center survey, only 22% of U.S. adults said they trust the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. Perhaps surprisingly, this was up 6 percentage points from the year before, but it’s too early to tell if that’s a blip or a trend. Last year’s measure of 16% was among the lowest in more than six decades of polling.
Americans can feel the sour vibe. In a 2018 Center survey, 3 in 4 said public confidence in the federal government was shrinking. And about 2 in 3 U.S. adults agreed that a low level of trust in the government makes it harder to solve the nation’s problems.
What are the public’s issues with the feds? In a 2022 Center survey, majorities said the federal government unfairly benefits some people over others, doesn’t respond to the needs of ordinary Americans, and isn’t adequately careful with taxpayer money.
Notably, mistrust of the federal government is widespread in both parties. One key distinction: Republicans’ levels of trust tend to differ depending on whether one of their own is sitting in the Oval Office. Trust among Democrats, who lean toward wanting the federal government to play a larger role in public life, is a bit more stable across administrations.
Another key distinction is that partisans hold different views when it comes to the career employees who staff the federal government. In the 2022 survey, 65% of Democrats—but only 38% of Republicans—said they had confidence in career government workers.
There is, of course, a contradiction at the heart of all this mistrust. As the Center reported two years ago, “Americans’ unhappiness with government has long coexisted with their continued support for government having a substantial role in many realms.”
And there is the rub. Americans want to be protected from terrorism, have safe food and medicine, and get help when there are natural disasters, to name a few significant needs. In fact, they say the government is doing a pretty good job in several such areas. Some individual federal agencies—think the National Park Service, the Postal Service, and NASA—also continue to have high favorability ratings.
Trust in the Supreme Court, Congress, political parties
How are other parts of government doing?
Not much better. A Center survey last year found that unfavorable views of the Supreme Court exceeded favorable ones for the first time since we started asking this question in 1987, driven by sharply declining trust in the court among Democrats. Views have not meaningfully improved as of this year.
Congress has faced a growing decline in confidence. Around 7 in 10 Americans have an unfavorable view of Congress, an institution that has run in the red on this front for well over a decade. And a whopping 85% of Americans say they don’t think elected officials care what people like them think.
Political parties hardly fare better. Aside from the obvious point that each side has dim views of the other, a record 28% of Americans have unfavorable views of both the Democratic and Republican parties, up from 7% about two decades ago.
Overall, the title of a comprehensive Center report on this topic last year—“Americans’ Dismal View of the Nation’s Politics”—captures the sentiment best.
Trust in news and information sources
Americans are living through a massive shift in the way they get information about the changing world around them. Traditional mainstream media outlets such as daily newspapers and radio stations are in decline, sources that cater to one ideological worldview are proliferating, and social media platforms are providing a nonstop stream of information (and misinformation).
Whether as cause or effect, trust in the mainstream national media has dropped in recent years, most precipitously on the ideological right. Republicans’ confidence in national news organizations has plummeted since 2016, even as trust in local news stays fairly solid across party boundaries.
Overall, about 6 in 10 Americans have at least some trust in information from national news organizations. But although 77% of Democrats trust the news media, only 42% of Republicans do. And many Americans think the news they see is only a portion of what they should be seeing: A majority of U.S. adults say the news media purposely avoids reporting certain stories.
For its part, social media hasn’t replaced traditional media in terms of trust. But this could change as the digital information landscape evolves and as younger Americans determine which sources they’ll place confidence in. Today, adults under 30 are the most likely to say they have at least some trust in the information they glean from social media: Half say so, compared with only a third of adults overall.
Trust in science
It can be a challenge for polls to measure trust in an institution as diffuse as the scientific establishment. But it’s possible to lay out enough pieces to get a glimpse of the larger puzzle.
Overall, it seems most Americans continue to trust the scientific endeavor, even as trust took a hit during the pandemic.
In April 2020—the early days of COVID-19—87% of Americans had confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. By fall of last year, a majority of adults still expressed that view, but the figure had dropped 14 percentage points to 73%. This was driven by a disproportionately steep loss of confidence among Republicans.
The partisan divide is also reflected in diverging views about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had a 78% favorable rating among Democrats in summer 2024 but only a 33% approval rating among Republicans.
Looked at through a slightly wider lens, 57% of Americans say that science itself has had a mostly positive effect on society. That’s still a majority, but a smaller one than at any point in the last eight years of Center polling.
Trust in educational institutions
The past decade has also seen a major shift in opinion about higher education and even K-12 schools. This began long before the recent campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war and came from the ideological right.
In 2010, Republicans were more likely to say that colleges and universities were having a positive impact than a negative one on the country’s progress (58% positive, 32% negative). But by the second half of that decade, their views had flipped. These views have persisted. In January of this year, only 31% of Republicans said that colleges were having a positive impact on the nation, compared with 74% of Democrats. And the majority of Republicans in a 2023 survey said it’s less important now than in the past to have a college degree (57%, compared with 43% of Democrats).
A majority of Democrats, in contrast, have consistently said that colleges and universities are making a positive contribution to the country. Even so, a 2018 survey found that 52% of Democrats saw the higher education system as heading in the wrong direction. Their primary reason: the hefty price tag on tuition. About 7 in 10 Republicans also said that higher education was headed the wrong way. This group pointed a finger at tuition costs, too, but many also felt that professors were bringing their personal opinions into the classroom and that students were being intellectually sheltered.
Following heated protests over mask policies and school closures related to the pandemic, we began asking similar questions about K-12 public schools. And we found the same pattern: In our January survey, 72% of Democrats—versus only 34% of Republicans—said K-12 public schools were having a positive effect on the way things are going in the U.S.
Teachers are aware of this changing sentiment. In a 2024 survey of U.S. public school teachers, nearly half felt that most Americans don’t trust them much or at all. A large majority of teachers said that public K-12 education had gotten worse over the past five years. And just over half expect that negative trend to continue.
Who is trusted?
Is there a counternarrative here? Perhaps. Many observers have noted that even though trust in government is low, turnout in recent elections has been high. In the 2020 presidential election, the U.S. recorded the highest level of voter turnout in more than a century.
And there are some institutions that the public continues to deem trustworthy. A large majority of Americans (86%) say that small businesses have a positive impact on the country. Nearly 3 in 4 say they have confidence in the military to work in the public’s best interests. Police officers and public school principals also garner majority trust, though both have seen their ratings go down a bit since the start of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, about 6 in 10 Americans say that churches and religious organizations have a positive impact on the country. But there is a major partisan gap in views between Republicans (a party whose largest religious subgroup is White evangelical Protestants) and Democrats (a party in which those without any religious affiliation make up the largest “religious subgroup”). Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans say that churches are making the country a better place. At the same time, just over half of Democrats think that they have a negative effect on the country’s direction.
But organized religion has not bucked the overall trend in declining trust. According to Gallup, in the past 20 years the share of U.S. adults who express a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the church or organized religion has fallen from 53% to 32%.
So now what?
If there’s an upside to the fact that we have a national problem with trust, it’s that we know it. About 2 in 3 Americans say it’s very important that we raise the level of trust we have in the federal government.
Even better, most of us think we can do something about it. More than 8 in 10 Americans say that confidence in the government can be increased, according to a 2018 survey. Their suggestions for how to go about this range from political reforms such as increased transparency or term limits to asking for more integrity from our political leaders.
A majority of Americans (58%) also say it’s important to raise the level of confidence we have in each other. And around 9 in 10 say that we can make progress here. Some of the most-mentioned suggestions: being less partisan, embracing values such as honesty and kindness, and electing more inspiring leaders.
These are hard asks, of course. But the belief in the possibility of change is bipartisan, and that’s a start.
Claudia Deane is executive vice president of Pew Research Center.
The Takeaway
Americans’ trust in some key national institutions, often riven by political polarization, is at historic lows—but most people say we can increase confidence. Suggestions include being less partisan, embracing kindness, and electing inspiring leaders.
