Polls show Americans have lost confidence in federal government, public health leaders
Stephanie Soucheray, MA27 minutes ago.
Public Health
Two new polls, one from the Annenberg Foundation and one from the Associated Press (AP), show that American adults are losing confidence in the federal government in matters of healthcare, and trust in public health figures, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former US public health leader Anthony Fauci, MD, are dropping.
In the Annenberg poll, just 38% of Americans said last month they are confident that Kennedy is providing trustworthy information about public health. That proportion is statistically unchanged from both April 2026 (37%) and February 2025 (38%), the Annenberg foundation said.
National confidence in Anthony Fauci, MD, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), took a hit over the summer, when Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee but declined to answer its questions on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fifty percent of respondents said they are somewhat or very confident that Fauci provided the public with trustworthy information about matters concerning public health, a statistically significant decline of 5 percentage points, from 55%, in April 2026. Overall, Fauci still is considered much more trustworthy than Kennedy.
The Annenberg poll showed that an overwhelming majority of adults trust their personal healthcare providers (87%) to provide them with trustworthy information about matters of public health, statistically unchanged from 88% in September 2024.
But confidence in large government organizations to do so is dropping. In the latest poll, 61% express confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 59% in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and 61% in the NIH, all of which declined markedly since September 2024. Confidence levels in the 2024 poll were at 71% for the CDC, 73% for the FDA, and 74% for the NIH>
The survey was conducted August 4 to 17 among 1,904 U.S. adults and has an estimated margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
Only 16% of Americans trust feds about healthcare
In a poll from the AP and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, respondents voiced a general decline in confidence in all information from the federal government, including information related to healthcare and public health, since a 2024 poll.“The share of Americans expressing a great deal or quite a bit of trust in federal government information about inflation and the cost of living fell from 26% to 18%, while trust in information about health care declined from 26% to 16%, the environment from 21% to 12%, jobs and unemployment from 25% to 15%, abortion from 21% to 11%, and elections and politics from 22% to 13%,” the AP said.
Mistrust is higher than it was in 2019, the poll found, with both a majority of Republicans and Democrats saying they don’t believe what elected officials say.
The poll includes 1,036 respondents, with an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. It was conducted from July 29 to August 10.