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US approval issued several major federal government agencies There has been a significant decline since then donald trump Returned to office as the President reshaped the federal government and its mission.
While some of the agencies Trump has targeted have fallen out of public favor, others, such as Department of Defense and Homeland Security, have seen theirs approval rating Increase the policies of the administration as per your commitment.
“For decades, there has been a lot of concern about the decline of trust in government in the United States, as well as trying to figure out what to do about it,” said Dr. Don Kettle, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Independent.
“The Trump administration has essentially taken a very different kind of strategy on that problem, attacking the things it wants to attack and weakening the parts of the bureaucracy it wants to weaken, but also promoting the course of the bureaucracy.”
Keitel says the end game, says Kettle, is to reduce bureaucratic approval to “cleanse out counterinsurgent forces” against the administration, with the specter of Project 2025 — the right-wing blueprint for government, put forward by allies of the Trump administration — lurking in the background.
New one gallup poll He showed approval for Federal Emergency Management Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, IRS and The CIA is at its lowest level since pollsters began recording in 2003.
EPA sees biggest decline since 2024, FEMAAnd the CDC shows a similar decline during Trump’s first presidency, from 2017 to 2021.
FEMA has suffered the most in the surveys, falling by 20 approval points from 2024 to 2025 – from 46 to 26 percent approval.
Kettle says this is primarily due to attacks during and after the presidential campaign, as well as arguments that FEMA was mismanaged, unfair, and tended to “punish” Republican states. “That story took off, even though it turned out not to be true, and I think that’s what caused the major downfall at FEMA,” he said.
The agency has undergone major changes in policy, funding, and staffing since Trump returned to office. In August, more than 180 agency officials signed an open letter to Congress to protest what they alleged was FEMA’s lack of ability to carry out its missions.
This included the elimination of life-saving risk management and preparedness programs, the reduction of FEMA’s workforce, and “censorship” of climate science and environmental protection to the detriment of the American people. Such cuts and policies, This could result in a Hurricane Katrina-level disaster, he said.,
“FEMA is not useful to the President unless it is necessary,” Kettle said. “It’s a difficult agency to try to manage because essentially there are only bad things that can happen to you.”
The CDC, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has also seen a significant decline in its public approval over the past 12 months, falling by 9 percentage points, from 40 percent approval overall to 31 percent.
Similar to FEMA, the decline followed major changes at the agency and the advent of the Make America Healthy Again agenda under Kennedy’s leadership. MAHA generally focuses on food quality, pharmaceuticals and vaccines.
Since taking control, Kennedy has overseen a complete overhaul of the independent committee that advises the CDC on vaccine guidance, as well as ousting the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, less than a month after her confirmation. Monárez later claimed he was ousted for pushing back against politically motivated changes in vaccine decision-making.
The decline in overall approval ratings for the CDC somewhat reflects Public perception of Kennedy And his work so far in the role of Health Secretary. A separate KFF poll found that nearly six in 10 Americans (59 percent) disapproved of Kennedy’s handling of the job. The KFF poll found that overall 62 percent of adults disapproved of Kennedy’s vaccine policy.
However, the decline in CDC approval ratings is less than during Trump’s first term, during which the agency faced the brunt of disapproval amid the COVID-19 pandemic, although the rhetoric from the Trump administration at the time increased distrust in the agency.
The President clashed with his own chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on several occasions over his handling of the pandemic.
According to Gallup, during that period (roughly 2019 to 2021), approval ratings for the CDC fell from 64 percent to 40 percent.
Gallup’s poll also found that after FEMA, the CDC and the CIA – each of which dropped 10 percentage points in approval – other agencies that saw declines in public approval were the FDA and EPA, which each dropped 7 points, and the IRS, which was down 6 points.
According to the pollster, performance ratings for these agencies ranged from 25 percent to 31 percent, between “excellent” or “good”, which is a record low for all except the IRS, which was one point lower in 2013.
“This is pretty strong evidence that a president who engages in sustained attacks on particular federal agencies is likely to lose his ratings because of public trust,” Kettle says.
By contrast, the federal agency that has seen the largest increase in public approval is one that has been at the forefront of Trump’s crackdown on immigration policy — the Department of Homeland Security.
According to Gallup, the department’s rating is up 10 points from last year’s record low of 42 percent, though it remains well below the high of 59 percent in 2017, when Trump first took office.
Pollsters have noted sharp partisan divides in the ratings of most agencies, especially with those supported by Trump – including DHS and the Defense Department, which Trump has also used to enact his immigration and domestic crime agenda.
Republicans and Republican-leaning candidates give the Defense Department a 74 percent approval rating and the DHS a 73 percent approval rating.
In contrast, only 59 percent of Democrats approve of DHS, 48 percent value the Defense Department and only 28 percent said they approve of the FBI.
Trump’s favoring of the agencies, and promoting their heads Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, exemplifies the administration’s strategy of ensuring “political loyalty,” Keitel said. Independent.
“The problem is why we created these bureaucracies to begin with,” he said. “We created bureaucracies to be able to do things that need to be done, and the more you focus on loyalty, the more you weaken efficiency.
“And if you, if you trade loyalty for expertise, you need expertise that probably isn’t there and … that their political costs could be very high.”
A small majority of Republicans (51 percent) also give the FBI a positive rating, although Gallup noted that its survey was taken during the period when the bureau was involved in the investigation and arrest of the suspect in the September 10 killing of Charlie Kirk.
Yet amid the partisanship, one federal agency has maintained a majority-level positive rating for its work – the U.S. Postal Service – which has been given a 56 percent positive rating overall.