Most government agencies mired in negative ratings: Gallup
A majority of Americans continue to have a negative view of the job performance of most government agencies, making 2023 the third year in a row with “relatively low readings,” according to a new poll.
The Gallup survey, released Thursday, found 12 of the 16 federal government agencies and departments included in the poll received negative job ratings, with the Internal Revenue Service garnering the worst score: a 70 percent negative rating.
Negative ratings are classified as respondents rating the job performance as “poor or only fair.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also were near the bottom, with each receiving a 66 percent negative score, according to the survey.
The Federal Reserve Board and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) weren’t too far ahead, either, receiving a 62 and 61 percent negativity rating, respectively.
Only four agencies or departments received positive ratings — or an “excellent” or “good” score on job performance — in the survey.
The U.S. Posted Service (USPS) received the highest rating at 62 percent positive. The Secret Service was second with a 55 percent positive rating, followed by the Department of Defense and NASA with 53 and 52 percent, respectively.
Six of the other entities — the State Department, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI, CIA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — received positive ratings between 40 and 49 percent.
Gallup, which has tracked these ratings — with the exception of NASA — since 1990, found the agency ratings largely dropped between 2019 and 2021 and have not returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.
USPS is the only entity to have gained a majority-level positive rating since 2003, while most of the current readings are at or below the trend averages, the researchers said.
Nine of the 16 agencies are at or near their lowest points in the trend, though little change was reported from last year. Gallup said the only “significant shift” was a 6-point decrease in Americans’ rating of the CIA.
Ratings differed among political parties, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents viewing 15 of the 16 entities more positively than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents do.
While at least half of Democrats rate 13 agencies positively, only the USPS gained majority-level positive ratings from Republicans.
The ratings gap is the largest for the FBI and the CDC at 44 points each.
Gallup said Republicans’ rating of the FBI first fell in 2017 and continued to fall in the coming years. The researchers pointed to the agency’s investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and former President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents as potential contributors to this trend.
As for the CDC, criticism of the agency’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic likely played a factor in Republican’s negative rating, Gallup said.
The survey was conducted Sept. 1-23 with a random sample of 1,016 adults who are 18 and older living in all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
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