Poll: Voters distrust government in general
But many Americans like the specifics
WASHINGTON – Americans have low levels of trust in the federal government and most find it poorly run and wasteful in general, even as they give high marks to many of its specific programs, according to a new poll.
Nearly 6 in 10 respondents said they feel “frustrated” by the govern- ment and an additional 20 percent described themselves as “angry” toward it according to the largescale survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
About 3 in 4 said government is “pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves” rather than “run for the benefit of all the people,” and a similar share said the influence of money on the country’s politics has increased in recent years.
Only about 1 in 5 respondents said he or she trusts the government in
Washington to do the right thing most of the time. Large majorities had a low opinion of the honesty of the country’s elected officials. And in recent years, many have also soured on the judgment of their fellow citizens.
As recently as the mid1990s, large majorities in both parties and among self-described independents said they had “trust and confidence in the political wisdom of the American people.”
That view started to decline in the early 2000s, but took a sharp drop starting late in the George W. Bush administration, as partisan tensions mounted. That decline has continued through the Obama administration years, and today only slightly more than one-third of Democrats and Republicans and fewer than onequarter of independents say they have confidence in the public’s wisdom.
And yet, despite those multiple measures of unhappiness about government and politics in general, large majorities have positive views about much that the government does in specific.
About 3 out of 4 respondents said they feel that the government does a good job on issues that bipartisan majorities consider important, including ensuring safe food and medicine, responding to natural disasters and setting safety rules for workplaces.
The survey also found that nearly 3 in 4 respondents said the government was doing a good job “keeping the country safe from terrorism.” The survey, which interviewed about 6,000 adult Americans, was taken over several weeks of the fall, before the terror attacks this month in Paris.
Of 13 major government functions the survey asked about, majorities gave positive performance ratings to 10 of them, the survey found.
The biggest exception was managing the immigration system. Majorities of Democrats and Republicans agreed that the government handles immigration poorly, with only 28 percent saying the government was doing a good job.
Large majorities gave positive marks to a long list of government agencies, starting with the Postal Service, which, despite being a butt of many jokes in popular culture, gets a positive rating from 84 percent of Americans.
The Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI and the Social Security Administration all received favorable marks from large majorities of respondents. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Security Agency generated less agreement, but for both, 52 percent of respondents rated the agencies positively, with about 1 in 3 giving thumbs-down.
The biggest exceptions were, not surprisingly, the Internal Revenue Service and the embattled Department of Veterans Affairs, both of which more than half of respondents viewed negatively. In the case of the VA, that marked a sharp drop from the high marks it received in previous years.