Trust in information from the US federal government has fallen sharply across a range of major issues, with about six in 10 Americans expressing little or no confidence in official guidance on subjects including elections, foreign affairs and the environment, a new poll has found.
The survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts suggests public scepticism is higher than it was at the end of Donald Trump’s first term and has deepened since 2024.
The findings come as Mr Trump’s administration has moved to dismantle parts of the federal bureaucracy, with thousands of employees dismissed or leaving their posts and longstanding policies and agencies facing major changes.
Trust in federal government information declines
Only 13% of adults said they trusted federal government information about elections and politics “a great deal” or “quite a bit”, down from 22% in 2024. Confidence in information about the environment fell from 21% to 12% over the same period.
Trust also declined on issues including healthcare, inflation and the cost of living, jobs and unemployment, and abortion. In each case, fewer than one in five adults expressed a high level of confidence.
The poll found that 53% of Americans now have low trust in government information about education, up from 37% in 2019 and nine percentage points higher than last year.
The survey also points to growing uncertainty over the reliability of information generated or distributed using artificial intelligence. Nearly half of adults said they were more concerned than excited about AI’s impact on how they obtain information, while only 9% were extremely or very confident that AI-generated information, chatbots or search results were reliable and factual.
Shannon Ingram, a 46-year-old Democrat from Maryland, said changing health recommendations had contributed to her doubts.
“It’s pretty hard to trust anything that’s being communicated,” she said. “There is a significant amount of bias, and it comes from the people who are authoring the content.”
Election certification becomes a partisan issue
Confidence in official election results has also weakened ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Only 34% of adults said they trusted government certification of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit”, compared with 40% in 2024.
Certification is normally a routine process in which local and state officials confirm vote totals. But it has become increasingly politicised since Mr Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Just under half of Americans said they were extremely or very concerned that the federal government could publicly question election results, interfere with the count or pressure state officials to change the way results were certified or reported.
Democrats’ confidence has fallen particularly sharply. Only 44% now trust election certifications, down from 65% in 2024. Among Republicans, the figure is 29%, only slightly higher than it was two years ago.
The survey was conducted as Mr Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, sought tighter restrictions on postal voting and backed a requirement for proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Political campaign messages are viewed with similar suspicion. Only about one in 10 adults believe messages from either the Democratic or Republican campaigns are always or often based on factual information. Roughly one-quarter of members of each party trust their own side’s campaign messages to be factual at least often.
Growing divide between Democrats and Republicans
The poll found that trust in official information has become considerably more partisan than it was during Mr Trump’s first term.
Democrats are now more likely than Republicans to distrust information on several issues. Some 61% of Democrats have low trust in information about the federal budget, compared with 42% of Republicans. On crime, the comparable figures are 60% and 32%.
Republican mistrust rose while Joe Biden was president and declined after Mr Trump returned to the White House. Democrats’ doubts followed the opposite pattern, easing under Mr Biden before rising sharply since January 2025.
The partisan divide is less pronounced on vaccination recommendations and safety. About six in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents said they trusted federal information on the subject only a little or not at all.
Jeremy Cove, a 44-year-old Republican from Missouri, said he supported Mr Trump but had become more doubtful about some of the administration’s claims.
“I love Trump; I voted for Trump, but some of the things he’s doing just makes me distrust more,” he said.
The AP-NORC/USAFacts poll surveyed 1,036 US adults between July 29 and August 10. It was conducted through NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
