FreedomWorks Foundation Content

Polling Reveals Lack of Confidence in the Federal Government To Place Voters’ Interests Above Political Agendas

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A national survey by Scott Rasmussen from July 26-28 provides critical insight into voters’ current trust in the federal government, including whether or not they believe that the government pursues the interests of the American people over political agendas. Survey highlights include: 

  • When asked how often they trust the federal government to do the right thing, only 8 percent responded “about all of the time.”
  • When asked how important it is to restore trust in the federal government, 72 percent responded that it is very important. 
  • When asked what would do more to restore trust in the federal government, 67 percent said that the government should be more responsive to voters and show less deference to policy experts. 
  • When asked if there is a “deep state” of career government employees who pursue their own interests and agendas rather than the policies of the elected president, 64 percent responded yes. 
  • When asked whether or not the 50,000 senior government officials who have some level of influence over policy seek to serve the American people or pursue their own policy agenda, 57 percent agreed that these officials seek to pursue their own policy agenda. 

Adam Brandon, FreedomWorks President, commented: 

“You don’t have to be paying much attention to understand how badly the Biden Administration is failing, and just how much trust in the federal government has plummeted over the past 18 months. However, the sad truth is that even before Biden took office, the federal government has long suffered from bureaucratic bloat and obstructionism from unelected and unappointed career government officials who would rather pursue their own agenda than be accountable to voters. If we are to restore faith in the federal government, we need to get serious about reforming the bureaucracy and making sure that those in charge face consequences for putting politics above people.” 

(Methodology:This Counterpolling™ survey of 1,200 Registered Voters was conducted online by Scott Rasmussen on July 26-28, 2022. Field work for the survey was conducted by RMG Research, Inc. Certain quotas were

applied, and the sample was lightly weighted by geography, gender, age, race, education, internet usage, and political party to reasonably reflect the nation’s population of Registered Voters. Other variables were reviewed to ensure that the final sample is representative of that population. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 2.8 percentage points.)

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