by Manzanita Miller
President-elect Donald Trump just announced his sweeping plan to slash the size of the federal government through a new government agency run by businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The temporary agency, which Trump has named the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will be tasked with slashing government bureaucracy, ending nonsensical regulations, and cutting wasteful expenditures, initiatives the American people appear all too happy to see put into action.
Polling shows public trust in government has cratered in recent years, and a majority of voters want to see significant reform and a scale back of the federal government’s interference in their lives.
According to a survey from the Partnership for Public Service conducted this spring before the November election, public trust in government tumbled during the last two years of the Biden Administration, going from 35 percent two years ago to just 23 percent today. The survey also found two-thirds of Americans, 66 percent, say the federal government is incompetent, up 10 percentage points since 2022.
Trust in the federal government more than halved among Republicans, going from an already feeble 23 percent of Republicans in 2022 to only ten percent in 2024. Even among Democrats, trust in government collapsed thirteen points between 2022 and 2024, going from 52 percent to 39 percent.
According to the survey, trust in the federal government cratered among key groups of Americans that shifted toward Trump in the 2024 election.
Hispanic trust in government tumbled an alarming twenty-two percentage points in the last two years of the Biden Administration, going from 45 percent to 23 percent. Trust among young people halved, going from a meager 30 percent to just 15 percent in two years. Both these groups shifted substantially toward President Trump in the general election. Trust also fell steeply among men, who broadly supported Trump in the general election, falling from 37 percent two years ago to only 24 percent today.
The Partnership survey also shows the share of Americans saying the federal government has a good impact has declined eleven points in two years, going from 42 percent in 2022 to 31 percent this year.
The survey also found 85 percent of Americans believe the federal government is wasteful, 74 percent believe it is corrupt, and 66 percent say it is incompetent. Just 21 percent of Americans say the federal government listens to the public.
This lack of trust in government is borne out in research from mainstream opinion researchers as well. Pew Research survey data showed less than a quarter of Americans – a mere 22 percent – trust the government to do what is right “always or most of the time”.
The same survey found over half of Americans – 56 percent – say the government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient”, not exactly a standing ovation for Washington’s role in our daily lives. The poll also found six in ten Americans feel “frustration” toward the government, while only 18 percent say they are content with the government.
Gallup research also backs up the same sentiment. According to Gallup survey data, 55 percent of Americans say the government is doing “too much” compared to 41% who say government should do more.
Gallup’s business and industry sector ratings, which include views on how Americans feel about industry, show a bleak public view of Washington bureaucracy overall.
Views of the federal government as an industry sector are rated second from the bottom of a slate of twenty-five different industries, with only the deeply unpopular pharmaceutical industry ranking lower than the government.
The American people have been fed up with the bloated, incompetent, and inefficient expansion of the federal government for decades, and for the first time since the Ronald Reagan Administration, they appear to have a president willing to seriously reduce the scope of the federal government.
Broad swathes of the public do not trust or believe in the goodwill of the federal government, and trust has cratered during the Biden Administration in particular. That said, the incoming Trump administration and the newly founded DOGE along with the GOP Congress may be on the road to earning back public trust – if they deliver on their promise to reshape the government and make it work for the people as it was always intended to.
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Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
