The left has deserved the lack of trust in government:
- Virtually every institution thinks women have penises, including most of the "deep state" that Trump has not been able to purge. If ideology blinds leftists to obvious truths, then how can they be expected to get the hard stuff right?
- Covid was such a massive policy failure and - pace the "no kings" protests - a true authoritarian movement - that it demands multiple book-length treatments.
- "Climate justice" is also a scam. Global warming is real but the doomsday scenarios are not. Remember that "An Inconvenient Truth" predicted a 20 foot rise in the sea level. Gore was only off by about 19 feet 9 inches. But the movie won a Nobel prize and was favorably covered everywhere. Every prediction that conservatives are "denialists" about have failed to come true.
- The FBI, ATF, DoJ and IRS is weaponized against conservatives who are pro-life or opposed to school-board policies. In the latter case, they are labeled "domestic terrorists".
- The Biden White House, DoJ, FBI and more have been censoring conservative content such as Covid origins or Hunter Biden's laptop on all social media platforms including Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
- In education, I used to say the graph of 12th grade NAEP scores was the most depressing graph in education because for 30 years it never changed. It was just a 30-year plateau of stagnation. Well, congratulations leftists, with 2024 data, you finally got it to change - downwards. And you widened the gap between blacks and whites. There is nothing more destructive than liberal kindness. (You may wish to check out Left Back by Diane Ravitch (written before she became a crazy leftist), its a history of how the left has been dumbing down education for 100 years, going back to Dewey and progressive reformers.)
- the general leftist war on law and order. Go to YouTube and search for "Harlem in the 1930s" and you'll see digitally restored footage of black people moving through life with purpose and dignity. You'll see the people who built black Wall Street, black schools, black banks, and black newspapers. And everyone you'll see will be married. Then search for "Harlem in the 1980s" and it looks like a war zone. (Guiliani was elected on a law-and-order platform in 1991).
- now we've got the Somali immigrants repeating the European playbook in the US. Just using official UK data, the number of rapes has increased 5-fold in the past 15 years and we also know from the Rotherham grooming gangs (read: Muslim rape gangs) that most rapes are not reported when the perpetrator is Muslim.
One of the main causes of distrust of federal government is the continual switcheroos. The Civil Rights Act says you can't discriminate by race. Switcheroo! We got racial quotas in education and employment. The Alternative Minimum Tax was levied to tax two hundred taxpayers who otherwise owed nothing. Switcheroo! The AMT ended up taxing millions. Bill Clinton promised a middle class tax cut. Switcheroo! Taxes went up on the rich but didn't go down for anybody. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Switcheroo! Men marrying men is now the law of the land, no matter what law Congress passed. Reagan agreed to amnesty for illegal aliens in return for strict enforcement of immigration laws. Switcheroo! Amnesty, plus twenty million more illegal aliens expecting another amnesty. Obama promised on dozens of occasions that under the Affordable Care Act, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it away from you." Switcheroo! You can keep your health care plan only if the government approves it. In 2020, the Democrats promised to raise the federal minimum wage and repeal the 2017 income tax cuts. They promised to build thousands of electric vehicle charging stations, extend internet to rural areas, and electrify the nation's school buses. Switcheroo! They ignored all that and impeached Trump (again). They recognized what inflation was doing to consumers so they passed an Inflation Reduction Act. Switcheroo! That Act spent 3/4 of its appropriations on costly renewable energy. Biden insists that he won't pardon his son, Hunter, for the crimes of which he was convicted. Switcheroo! Biden pardons his entire family and 4,200 others, commuting sentences even of murderers.
Distrust of government is the natural, inevitable result of official abuse of trust.
It is not as if the lack of trust in US government was unearned. Both incompetence and corruption, cannot find a bottom. Covid was a new low, from which, many Americans hoped we would bounce. They were wrong. Like Dante's levels of Hell, we just keep finding lower levels.
Even Americans who recognized the historical incompetence, lawlessness and grift of Covid gravely underestimated the scope and duration. The power grabs and theft were reminiscent of old TV game shows were shoppers race thru a grocery, grabbing all the free merchandise they can, in a limited time frame. Only this time it was trillions in no bid contracts and ever expanding government power, with a fleet of semi truck sized grocery carts.
After the safe return of Red State students in Aug 2020, what was the possible justification for delaying Blue school re openings for another year, except as a gift to Teacher's Unions? Now Randi Weingarten repeatedly recalls, with a straight face, her campaign to reopen schools, and Dems nod in agreement. All, as only 1 of 3 US public school students can perform at grade level.
For an encore, the Southern Border was purposefully dissolved, with not a single Covid demand required of any Biden new arrivals. Americans lost jobs and could not fly without a mandatory Covid jabs, but inexplicably no vaccination rules applied to a single member of Biden's Border 10 million.
Trillions in worthless Climate spending arrived with the Open Border, justified by Climate studies and models that were fairy tales, if not outright lies and distortions. DC handed Green billons to any politically connected Dem who could scratch out a business plan on the back of a bar napkin, and file Articles of Incorporation.
Nor was the graft limited to Americans. Billions were handed to foreign corps and NGOs doing the Lord's Green work or filing bogus Covid loss claims. A Canadian electric bus company pocketed $160 million US tax dollars, and promptly went BK, pre delivery. Areas of Nigeria are knee deep in Range Rovers, gifts from US taxpayers stemming from "Covid loss". Examples abound, around the globe.
The limited attention spans and near tribal political leanings of most Americans, are God's gift to lousy governance. Legislators with no net worth arrive in DC, earn $150K a year, while requiring 2 residences, and somehow magically accrue 8 and 9 figure portfolios. They are rewarded, based on jersey color, not with just personal riches, but ever more power, as their family members with no discernible skills, become wealthy along side them. The US has become the Nirvana of government corruption and ineptitude. 3rd world like incompetence, graft and waste is tolerated, in First World cleanliness and modernization.
Unfortunately the fraud during covid was bipartisan, and not restricted to big business. I realized how easy it was as a small business to get free money, all it took was a little lie, and I'm certainly not one to claim moral superiority as I've a long list of failings all by myself.
Demand skyrocketed, and I began to notice most contracts were coming from the owners of other small businesses. A few years ago Pro Publica put out a searchable public listing of companies receiving PPP "loans" that automatically turned into grants. I'll link to a zip code in Boulder.
When I go and look at the companies and google their names I come up with all kinds of things like people who work online all day anyway, and had no reason to lay off due to covid. Lawyers, consultants galore, anyone and everyone. They dwarfed the unemployment cheaters. Under 2 million and the paperwork wasn't even looked at by a human.
Later I looked at those environmental earmarks that did make it through legislation. The Green New Deal might have failed but a lot made it through to my state where orgs had to wait to get the moneys because the org hadn't progressed beyond the grant proposal stage yet, they were spending entirely on salaries. Money is still there, our state sued the Trump admin to keep them from taking it back.
The bad part is we do need to spend to assist on unemployment or to save some sectors of the economy from going under, or on environmental issues, but so much money is in fraud it's disheartening.
The corruption was, and is, undoubtedly bipartisan. Only the unnecessary prolonged school closures were largely partisan. Equally amazing was how few Blue State parents threw a fit over it. Of course, many may have just moved instead.
The hypocrisy was next level. Gavin Newsom's kids went back to their $40K a year, per child, CA private school, 10 months before most CA public schools reopened. And the man, inexplicably, still has a 50% approval rating in CA.
Every system is going to have error. The first question is whether false positives or false negatives are more damaging than the opposite. The classic example of this is the idea that “It’s better for 10 guilty men to go free than one innocent man be prosecuted”. With the COVID funds it was decided that the worst possible outcome was for a deserving business to be refused. So the process was streamlined with minimal oversight. This made fraud easy and therefore inevitable.
The GND was the opposite where money not flowing to organizations that checked the right D.E.I. boxes was deemed unacceptable, so the process was so onerous as to make it nearly impossible.
I figured it was ok despite the fraud as it was stimulus. The $600 per week for unemployment boosted all kinds of things much more than giving money to big companies. The money gets spent many times over the lower down the food chain of the people getting it.
The weaponization of the administrative state against domestic political opponents is a transgression that cannot be forgotten. I can almost dismiss graft as the cost of doing business, but I cannot tolerate what happened over the past 10 years.
It is inevitable that while government, at its best, try’s to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people, many folks will still not have their needs met. The more government programs, the more unhappy people.
“There are four ways in which you can spend money.
1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4. Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.”
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is conducting a project called Revitalizing American Institutions. Its mission is to reverse the severe distrust Americans feel toward institutions like the Congress, local government, and the colleges. Though I admire them for facing a problem most institutions ignore, I see very little prospect of success unless and until they can change the incentives under which the people in distrusted institutions work. For instance, Americans regard Congress with contempt, but the rate of re-election in the House of Representatives is 97%. In the Senate, 88% (source: Opensecrets.org). Americans seem to believe, "All Congressmen are crooks except mine." So, why change anything?
The answer, if there is one, is that an electorate so badly disgusted with the Congress will be glad to see Congress's power usurped by the executive and judicial branches. They ignored popular anger over illegal immigration, so the voters elected a President willing to do something about it. All they can do is impeach him over and over and watch the Supreme Court uphold his decisions.
I have no choice of senators and my congressman. The people running against them are worse. It's certainly not that I think my representatives are any good.
Is that a joke? Stanford's The Hoover Institute's first priority should be....Stanford and their quest for government censorship. See: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and
Stanford's Virality Project (VP) -- working hand-in-glove with the government and funded by the government for projects that tracked online "mis-, dis-, and mal-information."
What is it President Reagan who said that when someone government comes to help you the best thing you can do is run like hell. I might’ve paraphrase that, but his point is well taken.
I think this article does a good job summarizing what the polling says, but the deeper question for me is why trust has stayed low for nearly sixty years. If you step back and look at the long-term trend, the trust curve breaks sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and never recovers. The government had simultaneous failures in competence, honesty, and accountability, Vietnam and the “credibility gap,” domestic unrest, Watergate, inflation, along with a series of congressional and judicial decisions that made the system feel unstable. That wasn’t one bad episode. It was a structural failure across all the major institutions.
We do get occasional mood bumps, Reagan, late Clinton, post-9/11, but they behave like temporary deviations, not genuine reversals of a curve going inexorably down to a base of around 20% trust. The branches have not coordinated a systematic repair of the damage that occurred in that earlier period, so the trend line keeps returning to the same downward path it has been on since the 1970s.
Polarization doesn’t explain the original collapse, but it does make healing almost impossible. It turns distrust into a political weapon, which means neither party has an incentive to rebuild the legitimacy of the system as a whole.
So to me, the interesting story isn’t that trust is low again. It’s that the country never actually fixed what broke in the 60s and 70s. Until the executive branch, Congress, the courts, and even the military, reform themselves in a coordinated, credible way, I don’t see how trust can rise in a sustained statistically meaningful way much above where it is now. It may climb up for a brief time but then plunge right back down to the 20% baseline that the 60s and 70s set it on. In the past 50 years we saw that happen several times under different parties.
It isn’t impossible to repair, but it would take a sustained, cooperative effort across institutions, something we haven’t seen in a long time, but could choose to build again.
I do not believe one ideological side is responsible solely for this both sides participated in the events in the 60s and 70s and both sides need to repair it
"If you step back and look at the long-term trend, the trust curve breaks sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and never recovers."
Great observation! The social contract was broken in the 1960s. Law and order broke down in the 1960s. Drug use rose in the 1960s. Family broke down in the 1960s. Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School conquered academia in the 1960s. Government got bigger in the 1960s (Great Society) and we began to give money to single moms who didn't work in the 1960s.
Yes. Where it was really driven home to me is when you look at the period of 2008 to present we went through drastically different presidents, flipped the make up of the court and changed congress and there is no significant drift from the 20% base. I don’t have the actual numbers to do the curve fit but I am betting you would see the curve is heading to the 20% mark after the 70s. No one really looks at the US as a macro system so it is hard to see but this data covers a large enough period of time that someone that is grounded in Deming principles can start to see it
It can't be done. Government has turned into a jobs program for Democrats. In the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5-1. At the State Department, 4-1. At Health and Human Services, at Education, at Labor, at Transportation, at Commerce, 3-1. At Treasury, at Interior, at Agriculture, 2-1. In no federal department do Republicans outnumber Democrats.
It is a characteristic of government and the bigger it gets, the more people for whom it should be helping, but isn’t grows. Let’ try smaller government and see if that increases thrust. That would be a good item for the Democrat party to run on. “Keep more of your own money and spend it as you need to.”
Government growing really fast was part of this problem. For it to grow it needed more system competence and visible accountability. But I don’t think that’s the only issue. A lot went on in the 60-70s that caused this. The decrease in trust happened too quickly for big government to be the only issue. The suddenness of the drop in slope implies something else was also happening also. I do believe that a lack of running competent government systems with accountability surely is part of why it has stayed low
Agree about the shift in expectations of government and the role of government.
Since 1916, fed gubment expenditures per person have risen 16,000%.
But there are two other equally significant factors. The first is that beginning with the Clinton shutdown of 1995, wherein the House weakly caved, the House of Representatives has steadily shrunk in terms of its power and influence, regardless of which party is in control. This was done both by (largely) INACTION by Republicans who whiffed on Social Security reform under Bush and otherwise just sat out the last 30 years and by MALFEASANCE by the Ds, who wasted time on stupid Patriot Day (J6) investigations, on the Russia Hoax, and on two meaningless attempts to impeach Trump. When you use a joint or a muscle in the wrong way, it does not produce a healthy muscle but one that screws everything else up. Therefore---regardless of who wins in 2026 (I think Rs already have a 218 minimum lock), IT WON'T MATTER because the House has totally neutered itself. Today, that's mostly partisanship, but also a lot of cowardice in the R caucus who don't want to do anything that might rock the boat. Ds just want to crash into an iceberg.
The final determinant in the decline of trust in government is Biden's horrific fasictified presidency. Combine that with Trump's unwise endorsement of the China Virus vax and its murderous overtones, "Arctic Frost," Mar-a-Lago, the complete unwillingness of either W or either D administration to deal with illegals (all three encouraged them), distrust is not only obvious, it's necessary.
If you go beyond Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual," and read Carl Schmitt, an actual Nazi jurist, you understand politics as fighting your enemy and gifting your friends. And that is all. Trust has nothing to do with the case.
In the US today we are blessed with social scientist Tim Walz, who is conducting a double-blind scientific experiment to demonstrate that politics in Minnesota is always and everywhere about gifting the Somalis -- in return for their votes.
In the 20th century, the federal government did the following and much more:
- Fought and won two world wars.
- Brought the robber barons to heel.
- Built dams throughout the West and in the Tennessee valley
- Electrified rural houses and communities
- Built the world's biggest road networks
- Created and expanded the air traffic network
- Ensured that everyone would have a telephone
- Conquered hunger in America
- Regulated the food industry, making food much safer
- Stabilized agriculture
- Sent millions of veterans to college
- Enabled two-thirds of Americans to own their homes
What has the federal government done for anyone in the 21st century? How have state and local governments improved lives in the last 25 years? TRUST is hard won, and easily lost.
Karlyn Bowman’s argument rests on a nostalgic premise that distrust in the federal government emerged only when Washington “expanded” in the 1960s. That framing is historically inaccurate. It ignores the deep pre-1960 lineage of anti–big government rhetoric and erases the mid-century conservative campaign that targeted the administrative state long before the Great Society.
First, the idea that pre-1960 America enjoyed an “unstated compact” in which Washington did little and citizens refrained from criticism is untenable. Federal power has been the subject of intense conflict since the founding—through Jackson’s Bank War, Reconstruction, the Progressive regulatory state, the New Deal, and two world wars. The modern administrative state was already large by 1945, and it was controversial the moment it was built.
Second, Bowman omits the immediate post-WWII backlash against federal authority, when conservatives warned that wartime mobilization and New Deal institutions had created a “slave state,” a “planned economy,” and a “fourth branch of government.” This was not fringe commentary. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom reached millions through its Reader’s Digest condensation; business coalitions launched coordinated messaging about bureaucratic tyranny; prominent members of Congress and influential newspapers framed federal expansion as a threat to liberty. The intellectual vocabulary of modern anti-statism—“central planning,” “bureaucratic despotism,” “loss of freedom”—was already fully developed by 1947. Bowman’s chronology wipes away this history because it contradicts her claim that distrust arose only when LBJ expanded domestic programs.
Third, Bowman treats the unusually high trust levels of 1958–64 as America’s natural baseline. Political scientists generally view that period as an aberration shaped by postwar prosperity, Cold War unity, and exceptional institutional legitimacy. It is methodologically unsound to take this short, unrepresentative window—captured only because systematic polling begins in 1958—and present it as the normal American condition from which the nation later declined. The longer sweep of U.S. political development features recurrent skepticism of federal authority, not a tranquil pre-1960 trust compact.
Fourth, acknowledging this earlier history does not mean conservatives are the only Americans who have ever distrusted the federal government. Liberals, moderates, and independents have all lost confidence during Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, Katrina, and Covid. But those collapses were event-driven, triggered by specific failures. The form of distrust Bowman is describing—enduring, ideological hostility to the federal state—has a distinct genealogy. It originates not with the Great Society but with the postwar conservative mobilization against the administrative state. That foundational history is simply absent from her analysis.
Fifth, Bowman’s appeal to “what the founders understood” selectively retrofits contemporary anti-statism into an 18th-century context that does not support it. The Founders were deeply divided on federal power, and the Constitution was designed for balanced governance—not perpetual public suspicion of federal institutions. The sustained anti-government ideology she invokes is a product of mid-20th-century politics, not the Philadelphia Convention.
Taken together, Bowman’s narrative depends on a truncated historical frame beginning in 1958 and a silence about the decades-long conservative project to delegitimize the administrative state. By leaving out that intellectual and political groundwork, she treats distrust as an organic, inevitable public reaction to “big government” rather than the predictable result of a well-developed ideological campaign. A historically serious account of trust in government must acknowledge this earlier lineage. Bowman’s essay does not.
Question re: the lackluster rollout of EV charging stations and rural broadband: Was the plan to contract out to private companies or was the govt trying to do it directly?
The left has deserved the lack of trust in government:
- Virtually every institution thinks women have penises, including most of the "deep state" that Trump has not been able to purge. If ideology blinds leftists to obvious truths, then how can they be expected to get the hard stuff right?
- Covid was such a massive policy failure and - pace the "no kings" protests - a true authoritarian movement - that it demands multiple book-length treatments.
- "Climate justice" is also a scam. Global warming is real but the doomsday scenarios are not. Remember that "An Inconvenient Truth" predicted a 20 foot rise in the sea level. Gore was only off by about 19 feet 9 inches. But the movie won a Nobel prize and was favorably covered everywhere. Every prediction that conservatives are "denialists" about have failed to come true.
- The FBI, ATF, DoJ and IRS is weaponized against conservatives who are pro-life or opposed to school-board policies. In the latter case, they are labeled "domestic terrorists".
- The Biden White House, DoJ, FBI and more have been censoring conservative content such as Covid origins or Hunter Biden's laptop on all social media platforms including Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
- In education, I used to say the graph of 12th grade NAEP scores was the most depressing graph in education because for 30 years it never changed. It was just a 30-year plateau of stagnation. Well, congratulations leftists, with 2024 data, you finally got it to change - downwards. And you widened the gap between blacks and whites. There is nothing more destructive than liberal kindness. (You may wish to check out Left Back by Diane Ravitch (written before she became a crazy leftist), its a history of how the left has been dumbing down education for 100 years, going back to Dewey and progressive reformers.)
- the general leftist war on law and order. Go to YouTube and search for "Harlem in the 1930s" and you'll see digitally restored footage of black people moving through life with purpose and dignity. You'll see the people who built black Wall Street, black schools, black banks, and black newspapers. And everyone you'll see will be married. Then search for "Harlem in the 1980s" and it looks like a war zone. (Guiliani was elected on a law-and-order platform in 1991).
- now we've got the Somali immigrants repeating the European playbook in the US. Just using official UK data, the number of rapes has increased 5-fold in the past 15 years and we also know from the Rotherham grooming gangs (read: Muslim rape gangs) that most rapes are not reported when the perpetrator is Muslim.
One of the main causes of distrust of federal government is the continual switcheroos. The Civil Rights Act says you can't discriminate by race. Switcheroo! We got racial quotas in education and employment. The Alternative Minimum Tax was levied to tax two hundred taxpayers who otherwise owed nothing. Switcheroo! The AMT ended up taxing millions. Bill Clinton promised a middle class tax cut. Switcheroo! Taxes went up on the rich but didn't go down for anybody. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Switcheroo! Men marrying men is now the law of the land, no matter what law Congress passed. Reagan agreed to amnesty for illegal aliens in return for strict enforcement of immigration laws. Switcheroo! Amnesty, plus twenty million more illegal aliens expecting another amnesty. Obama promised on dozens of occasions that under the Affordable Care Act, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period. No one can take it away from you." Switcheroo! You can keep your health care plan only if the government approves it. In 2020, the Democrats promised to raise the federal minimum wage and repeal the 2017 income tax cuts. They promised to build thousands of electric vehicle charging stations, extend internet to rural areas, and electrify the nation's school buses. Switcheroo! They ignored all that and impeached Trump (again). They recognized what inflation was doing to consumers so they passed an Inflation Reduction Act. Switcheroo! That Act spent 3/4 of its appropriations on costly renewable energy. Biden insists that he won't pardon his son, Hunter, for the crimes of which he was convicted. Switcheroo! Biden pardons his entire family and 4,200 others, commuting sentences even of murderers.
Distrust of government is the natural, inevitable result of official abuse of trust.
It is not as if the lack of trust in US government was unearned. Both incompetence and corruption, cannot find a bottom. Covid was a new low, from which, many Americans hoped we would bounce. They were wrong. Like Dante's levels of Hell, we just keep finding lower levels.
Even Americans who recognized the historical incompetence, lawlessness and grift of Covid gravely underestimated the scope and duration. The power grabs and theft were reminiscent of old TV game shows were shoppers race thru a grocery, grabbing all the free merchandise they can, in a limited time frame. Only this time it was trillions in no bid contracts and ever expanding government power, with a fleet of semi truck sized grocery carts.
After the safe return of Red State students in Aug 2020, what was the possible justification for delaying Blue school re openings for another year, except as a gift to Teacher's Unions? Now Randi Weingarten repeatedly recalls, with a straight face, her campaign to reopen schools, and Dems nod in agreement. All, as only 1 of 3 US public school students can perform at grade level.
For an encore, the Southern Border was purposefully dissolved, with not a single Covid demand required of any Biden new arrivals. Americans lost jobs and could not fly without a mandatory Covid jabs, but inexplicably no vaccination rules applied to a single member of Biden's Border 10 million.
Trillions in worthless Climate spending arrived with the Open Border, justified by Climate studies and models that were fairy tales, if not outright lies and distortions. DC handed Green billons to any politically connected Dem who could scratch out a business plan on the back of a bar napkin, and file Articles of Incorporation.
Nor was the graft limited to Americans. Billions were handed to foreign corps and NGOs doing the Lord's Green work or filing bogus Covid loss claims. A Canadian electric bus company pocketed $160 million US tax dollars, and promptly went BK, pre delivery. Areas of Nigeria are knee deep in Range Rovers, gifts from US taxpayers stemming from "Covid loss". Examples abound, around the globe.
The limited attention spans and near tribal political leanings of most Americans, are God's gift to lousy governance. Legislators with no net worth arrive in DC, earn $150K a year, while requiring 2 residences, and somehow magically accrue 8 and 9 figure portfolios. They are rewarded, based on jersey color, not with just personal riches, but ever more power, as their family members with no discernible skills, become wealthy along side them. The US has become the Nirvana of government corruption and ineptitude. 3rd world like incompetence, graft and waste is tolerated, in First World cleanliness and modernization.
Unfortunately the fraud during covid was bipartisan, and not restricted to big business. I realized how easy it was as a small business to get free money, all it took was a little lie, and I'm certainly not one to claim moral superiority as I've a long list of failings all by myself.
Demand skyrocketed, and I began to notice most contracts were coming from the owners of other small businesses. A few years ago Pro Publica put out a searchable public listing of companies receiving PPP "loans" that automatically turned into grants. I'll link to a zip code in Boulder.
https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/search?q=80302&v=1
When I go and look at the companies and google their names I come up with all kinds of things like people who work online all day anyway, and had no reason to lay off due to covid. Lawyers, consultants galore, anyone and everyone. They dwarfed the unemployment cheaters. Under 2 million and the paperwork wasn't even looked at by a human.
Later I looked at those environmental earmarks that did make it through legislation. The Green New Deal might have failed but a lot made it through to my state where orgs had to wait to get the moneys because the org hadn't progressed beyond the grant proposal stage yet, they were spending entirely on salaries. Money is still there, our state sued the Trump admin to keep them from taking it back.
The bad part is we do need to spend to assist on unemployment or to save some sectors of the economy from going under, or on environmental issues, but so much money is in fraud it's disheartening.
The corruption was, and is, undoubtedly bipartisan. Only the unnecessary prolonged school closures were largely partisan. Equally amazing was how few Blue State parents threw a fit over it. Of course, many may have just moved instead.
The hypocrisy was next level. Gavin Newsom's kids went back to their $40K a year, per child, CA private school, 10 months before most CA public schools reopened. And the man, inexplicably, still has a 50% approval rating in CA.
Every system is going to have error. The first question is whether false positives or false negatives are more damaging than the opposite. The classic example of this is the idea that “It’s better for 10 guilty men to go free than one innocent man be prosecuted”. With the COVID funds it was decided that the worst possible outcome was for a deserving business to be refused. So the process was streamlined with minimal oversight. This made fraud easy and therefore inevitable.
The GND was the opposite where money not flowing to organizations that checked the right D.E.I. boxes was deemed unacceptable, so the process was so onerous as to make it nearly impossible.
I figured it was ok despite the fraud as it was stimulus. The $600 per week for unemployment boosted all kinds of things much more than giving money to big companies. The money gets spent many times over the lower down the food chain of the people getting it.
That's what we've come to - "I figured fraud was ok"???? Holy Mary we're doomed.
The weaponization of the administrative state against domestic political opponents is a transgression that cannot be forgotten. I can almost dismiss graft as the cost of doing business, but I cannot tolerate what happened over the past 10 years.
It is inevitable that while government, at its best, try’s to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people, many folks will still not have their needs met. The more government programs, the more unhappy people.
“There are four ways in which you can spend money.
1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4. Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.”
― Milton Friedman
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is conducting a project called Revitalizing American Institutions. Its mission is to reverse the severe distrust Americans feel toward institutions like the Congress, local government, and the colleges. Though I admire them for facing a problem most institutions ignore, I see very little prospect of success unless and until they can change the incentives under which the people in distrusted institutions work. For instance, Americans regard Congress with contempt, but the rate of re-election in the House of Representatives is 97%. In the Senate, 88% (source: Opensecrets.org). Americans seem to believe, "All Congressmen are crooks except mine." So, why change anything?
The answer, if there is one, is that an electorate so badly disgusted with the Congress will be glad to see Congress's power usurped by the executive and judicial branches. They ignored popular anger over illegal immigration, so the voters elected a President willing to do something about it. All they can do is impeach him over and over and watch the Supreme Court uphold his decisions.
I have no choice of senators and my congressman. The people running against them are worse. It's certainly not that I think my representatives are any good.
Is that a joke? Stanford's The Hoover Institute's first priority should be....Stanford and their quest for government censorship. See: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and
Stanford's Virality Project (VP) -- working hand-in-glove with the government and funded by the government for projects that tracked online "mis-, dis-, and mal-information."
What is it President Reagan who said that when someone government comes to help you the best thing you can do is run like hell. I might’ve paraphrase that, but his point is well taken.
Ronald Reagan said "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" were the nine most terrifying words in the English language.
I think this article does a good job summarizing what the polling says, but the deeper question for me is why trust has stayed low for nearly sixty years. If you step back and look at the long-term trend, the trust curve breaks sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and never recovers. The government had simultaneous failures in competence, honesty, and accountability, Vietnam and the “credibility gap,” domestic unrest, Watergate, inflation, along with a series of congressional and judicial decisions that made the system feel unstable. That wasn’t one bad episode. It was a structural failure across all the major institutions.
We do get occasional mood bumps, Reagan, late Clinton, post-9/11, but they behave like temporary deviations, not genuine reversals of a curve going inexorably down to a base of around 20% trust. The branches have not coordinated a systematic repair of the damage that occurred in that earlier period, so the trend line keeps returning to the same downward path it has been on since the 1970s.
Polarization doesn’t explain the original collapse, but it does make healing almost impossible. It turns distrust into a political weapon, which means neither party has an incentive to rebuild the legitimacy of the system as a whole.
So to me, the interesting story isn’t that trust is low again. It’s that the country never actually fixed what broke in the 60s and 70s. Until the executive branch, Congress, the courts, and even the military, reform themselves in a coordinated, credible way, I don’t see how trust can rise in a sustained statistically meaningful way much above where it is now. It may climb up for a brief time but then plunge right back down to the 20% baseline that the 60s and 70s set it on. In the past 50 years we saw that happen several times under different parties.
It isn’t impossible to repair, but it would take a sustained, cooperative effort across institutions, something we haven’t seen in a long time, but could choose to build again.
I do not believe one ideological side is responsible solely for this both sides participated in the events in the 60s and 70s and both sides need to repair it
"If you step back and look at the long-term trend, the trust curve breaks sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and never recovers."
Great observation! The social contract was broken in the 1960s. Law and order broke down in the 1960s. Drug use rose in the 1960s. Family broke down in the 1960s. Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School conquered academia in the 1960s. Government got bigger in the 1960s (Great Society) and we began to give money to single moms who didn't work in the 1960s.
Yes. Where it was really driven home to me is when you look at the period of 2008 to present we went through drastically different presidents, flipped the make up of the court and changed congress and there is no significant drift from the 20% base. I don’t have the actual numbers to do the curve fit but I am betting you would see the curve is heading to the 20% mark after the 70s. No one really looks at the US as a macro system so it is hard to see but this data covers a large enough period of time that someone that is grounded in Deming principles can start to see it
We need to Make Government Great Again.
It can't be done. Government has turned into a jobs program for Democrats. In the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5-1. At the State Department, 4-1. At Health and Human Services, at Education, at Labor, at Transportation, at Commerce, 3-1. At Treasury, at Interior, at Agriculture, 2-1. In no federal department do Republicans outnumber Democrats.
It is a characteristic of government and the bigger it gets, the more people for whom it should be helping, but isn’t grows. Let’ try smaller government and see if that increases thrust. That would be a good item for the Democrat party to run on. “Keep more of your own money and spend it as you need to.”
Government growing really fast was part of this problem. For it to grow it needed more system competence and visible accountability. But I don’t think that’s the only issue. A lot went on in the 60-70s that caused this. The decrease in trust happened too quickly for big government to be the only issue. The suddenness of the drop in slope implies something else was also happening also. I do believe that a lack of running competent government systems with accountability surely is part of why it has stayed low
Agree about the shift in expectations of government and the role of government.
Since 1916, fed gubment expenditures per person have risen 16,000%.
But there are two other equally significant factors. The first is that beginning with the Clinton shutdown of 1995, wherein the House weakly caved, the House of Representatives has steadily shrunk in terms of its power and influence, regardless of which party is in control. This was done both by (largely) INACTION by Republicans who whiffed on Social Security reform under Bush and otherwise just sat out the last 30 years and by MALFEASANCE by the Ds, who wasted time on stupid Patriot Day (J6) investigations, on the Russia Hoax, and on two meaningless attempts to impeach Trump. When you use a joint or a muscle in the wrong way, it does not produce a healthy muscle but one that screws everything else up. Therefore---regardless of who wins in 2026 (I think Rs already have a 218 minimum lock), IT WON'T MATTER because the House has totally neutered itself. Today, that's mostly partisanship, but also a lot of cowardice in the R caucus who don't want to do anything that might rock the boat. Ds just want to crash into an iceberg.
The final determinant in the decline of trust in government is Biden's horrific fasictified presidency. Combine that with Trump's unwise endorsement of the China Virus vax and its murderous overtones, "Arctic Frost," Mar-a-Lago, the complete unwillingness of either W or either D administration to deal with illegals (all three encouraged them), distrust is not only obvious, it's necessary.
If you go beyond Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual," and read Carl Schmitt, an actual Nazi jurist, you understand politics as fighting your enemy and gifting your friends. And that is all. Trust has nothing to do with the case.
In the US today we are blessed with social scientist Tim Walz, who is conducting a double-blind scientific experiment to demonstrate that politics in Minnesota is always and everywhere about gifting the Somalis -- in return for their votes.
In the 20th century, the federal government did the following and much more:
- Fought and won two world wars.
- Brought the robber barons to heel.
- Built dams throughout the West and in the Tennessee valley
- Electrified rural houses and communities
- Built the world's biggest road networks
- Created and expanded the air traffic network
- Ensured that everyone would have a telephone
- Conquered hunger in America
- Regulated the food industry, making food much safer
- Stabilized agriculture
- Sent millions of veterans to college
- Enabled two-thirds of Americans to own their homes
What has the federal government done for anyone in the 21st century? How have state and local governments improved lives in the last 25 years? TRUST is hard won, and easily lost.
Karlyn Bowman’s argument rests on a nostalgic premise that distrust in the federal government emerged only when Washington “expanded” in the 1960s. That framing is historically inaccurate. It ignores the deep pre-1960 lineage of anti–big government rhetoric and erases the mid-century conservative campaign that targeted the administrative state long before the Great Society.
First, the idea that pre-1960 America enjoyed an “unstated compact” in which Washington did little and citizens refrained from criticism is untenable. Federal power has been the subject of intense conflict since the founding—through Jackson’s Bank War, Reconstruction, the Progressive regulatory state, the New Deal, and two world wars. The modern administrative state was already large by 1945, and it was controversial the moment it was built.
Second, Bowman omits the immediate post-WWII backlash against federal authority, when conservatives warned that wartime mobilization and New Deal institutions had created a “slave state,” a “planned economy,” and a “fourth branch of government.” This was not fringe commentary. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom reached millions through its Reader’s Digest condensation; business coalitions launched coordinated messaging about bureaucratic tyranny; prominent members of Congress and influential newspapers framed federal expansion as a threat to liberty. The intellectual vocabulary of modern anti-statism—“central planning,” “bureaucratic despotism,” “loss of freedom”—was already fully developed by 1947. Bowman’s chronology wipes away this history because it contradicts her claim that distrust arose only when LBJ expanded domestic programs.
Third, Bowman treats the unusually high trust levels of 1958–64 as America’s natural baseline. Political scientists generally view that period as an aberration shaped by postwar prosperity, Cold War unity, and exceptional institutional legitimacy. It is methodologically unsound to take this short, unrepresentative window—captured only because systematic polling begins in 1958—and present it as the normal American condition from which the nation later declined. The longer sweep of U.S. political development features recurrent skepticism of federal authority, not a tranquil pre-1960 trust compact.
Fourth, acknowledging this earlier history does not mean conservatives are the only Americans who have ever distrusted the federal government. Liberals, moderates, and independents have all lost confidence during Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, Katrina, and Covid. But those collapses were event-driven, triggered by specific failures. The form of distrust Bowman is describing—enduring, ideological hostility to the federal state—has a distinct genealogy. It originates not with the Great Society but with the postwar conservative mobilization against the administrative state. That foundational history is simply absent from her analysis.
Fifth, Bowman’s appeal to “what the founders understood” selectively retrofits contemporary anti-statism into an 18th-century context that does not support it. The Founders were deeply divided on federal power, and the Constitution was designed for balanced governance—not perpetual public suspicion of federal institutions. The sustained anti-government ideology she invokes is a product of mid-20th-century politics, not the Philadelphia Convention.
Taken together, Bowman’s narrative depends on a truncated historical frame beginning in 1958 and a silence about the decades-long conservative project to delegitimize the administrative state. By leaving out that intellectual and political groundwork, she treats distrust as an organic, inevitable public reaction to “big government” rather than the predictable result of a well-developed ideological campaign. A historically serious account of trust in government must acknowledge this earlier lineage. Bowman’s essay does not.
Question re: the lackluster rollout of EV charging stations and rural broadband: Was the plan to contract out to private companies or was the govt trying to do it directly?