In State Government We Do Not Trust . . . Very Much

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 02/27/2026) Trust in government and institutions is low, but with work it can be restored.

Stephanie Leiser, Center for Local, State and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) at the Ford School of Public Policy, pointed to historic Gallup polling that put the federal government at the top of the least trusted. State government was a little more trusted. Local governments maintain a trust level of between 65 percent and 70 percent. Trust isn't just relegated to the electorate either.

"Nobody trusts each other, right now. The federal government doesn't trust the states. The states don't trust the feds. The locals don't trust the state. It's like every man for themselves right now," Leiser said.

Even the local elected officials' trust in their own residents has dropped.

CLOSUP showed the largest declines in trust have come from rural areas, with pre-COVID-19 pandemic numbers showing a larger trust in those areas and a flip after the pandemic. While fiscal numbers have subsided and returned to those local governments, the trust continues to fall.

Leiser said CLOSUP was looking into the reasons, but offered several points to look at, including the deluge of information that has arrived in the digital age.

"People are busy. There's only so much time you can spend reading the news and trying to absorb everything that's happening and that's a big problem," she said.

She said her kids were learning about media literacy, but many people hadn't grown up being exposed to the large amount of information available on the internet and social media.

Distrust in governments makes it hard to govern, she said, and it isn't the elected officials who feel that pinch. It's the ones working the bureaucracies and programs that are meant to help people the most, especially if policies change overnight or daily. The uncertainty contributes to erosion of trust.

"You're being set up to fail, and then you fail, and then people see you fail, and it's a feedback cycle," Leiser said.

She said building trust between government and constituents takes having consistent, good and positive interactions, which may explain why people trust their local officials more. They are in charge of plowing roads, enforcing parking and picking up trash.

"You want to take for granted they're being well run," she said. “It's not until something goes wrong that you go, ‘Wait a minute.'"

She said if the state works cooperatively with its local counterparts and presents a united front on some issues, it could restore trust.

"I don't think they can bypass local government in this equation and directly repair their relationship," she said.

Some don't see a difference between state and local governments. They wrap them up together when things go wrong or things go well. Sometimes, people don't give feedback at all, and that can be disheartening, Leiser said.

"Trust is a two-way street. Local officials do some things well, but we, as residents, need to make a decision. Engagement isn't just tweeting something or hearing and reposting something on social media. We've got communities. It's got to be a leap of faith," she said.

She said everyone is mad and someone has to be the first to offer the olive branch.

Joe Hamm, a Michigan State University Associate Professor in the school of Criminal Justice, defined trust as a willingness to accept vulnerability to someone else.

"If we want more people to like government, it makes sense for government to have control over our vulnerabilities, over things that could hurt us. They need reasons to believe that it's OK for them to be vulnerable to government and to feel OK in that process," Hamm said.

Case in point is how residents tend to trust their own local representative, but not those from outside their community.

Believing that government has people's best interests at heart is most under fire right now, as social media allows discussions that previous generations wouldn't have had outside a private setting.

Adding to this is when previous conspiracy theories are proven true. It further erodes institutional trust.

"I think there's something very human in this idea that when we see good stuff, we hope that pervades everything, but once we know bad things can happen, now we know those can be everywhere and we at least need to be careful about it," Hamm said.

He said there are genuine things happening that are genuinely damaging to the trust of the government. Those things needed to be dealt with in a transparent manner.

Also, some people will never trust government, although those people are also most likely to be dismissed in mainstream society.

"There were times in history where the government operated with a lot more impunity, because we just didn't ask. We didn't have the internet to talk about it if we had asked," he said.

In philosophy, a thought experiment exists based on "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," a short story written by Ursula K. Le Guin, that describes a utopia powered by a single tortured and neglected child. People can't abide the knowledge of the child and they walk away.

Hamm said society works on a similar basis. People blind themselves to the dirty things that happen that are part of society.

"The optimist in me wonders if this erosion of trust that we're talking about is a reorganizing around a more intentional space as a society, one that doesn't just assume if we can get 100 people to agree to something and the rest of us will just sign on because it makes our lives easier," he said.

He said government should be looking for those subjects that transcend the parties and truly make people's lives better or work in areas where both sides have common ground, such as kids or infrastructure.

Hamm said much of that was lost in the party fights and the struggle for power that overwhelms all other ideas of governance, as the wagons are circled during an election year.

"There's power in finding the group of people that seem to be loudest right now and making sure they love you. But there's a threat in that the group that doesn't agree is immediately threatened by that behavior," he said.

He said it isn't easy to sit between the two warring factions and do the right thing for society as a whole.

Many also have a tendency to retreat into a nostalgic vision of governance and society. Looking at everything as this is the way it is done, because it is the way it has always been done.

"The task that I would give to government is, rather than retreating to its own nostalgia of before the internet and before AI and before there were all these shared ideas, a forward look to what it is going to mean to have a healthy, functioning Michigan," Hamm said.