Trust in Government, 1958–2025
From 77% to 17% in six decades. The long collapse of Americans' trust in federal government, annotated.
In 1958, when researchers first asked Americans whether they trusted the federal government to do the right thing, 73 percent said yes. By 1964, it had climbed to 77 — the all-time high, the peak of postwar optimism.
Then came Vietnam. Watergate. Stagflation. The savings and loan crisis. The 1994 trough at 17 percent. A brief post-9/11 spike to 60. The Iraq War. The financial crisis. Slow erosion through every subsequent administration until today, when we’re back to 17 — one in six Americans.
The chart below traces that sixty-year arc.
What the shape tells us
The decline isn’t steady — it’s episodic. Each crisis bites a chunk off trust, and recovery never reaches the previous floor. After Vietnam and Watergate, trust recovered to the mid-40s. After the financial crisis, it never got above 26. The pattern suggests something structural, not merely cyclical: each generation of broken promises resets the baseline lower.
The 9/11 spike is the exception that proves the rule. Crisis alone doesn’t restore trust — crisis plus visible, competent government response does. That spike was gone within 18 months as the Iraq rationale collapsed.
The partisan split today
The 17% figure masks a deeper fracture. As of late 2025, only 9% of Democrats say they trust the federal government most of the time or always — the lowest Democratic reading ever recorded. Republicans sit at 26%, elevated by the change in administration. The gap between in-party and out-party trust has never been wider, which means the aggregate number will keep oscillating without either side actually recovering confidence in government as an institution.
Why this connects to the Foundation
The Social Contract component asks what it takes to rebuild the relationship between citizens and governance. This chart is the starting point for that conversation — not as an argument for cynicism, but as an honest accounting of where we are.
You can’t rebuild something without first admitting how broken it is.
Source: Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2025” (December 2025). Smoothed trend represents a three-survey moving average. Individual polls used for 1958–1975 and September 2025.