Less than two weeks ago, people acting on the authority of the President of the United States announced that they would “shut down” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the United States Digital Service –quickly renamed as the Department of Government Efficiency—directed to oversee the “transition”.
Since then, the U.S. Government has begun to formally cancel hundreds of USAID contracts and grants. The Administration’s actions the past two weeks have caused chaos and disruptions across the world. Project implementers and NGOs around the world are scrambling to assess and mitigate the damage to lifesaving programs and more.
While some of the Administration’s efforts are facing legal challenges and strong pushback from members of Congress, the actions of the U.S. Government will have real and lasting consequences for Americans and people around the world. In the short term, people’s lives are at stake. In the long run, people around the world will have a hard time ever trusting commitments by the United States Government again—even contractual commitments.
Unfortunately, they are not alone: most Americans don’t really trust their federal government either.
Local governments versus federal government
On issues as varied as education and crime, Americans often have a rosier view of how things are going in their own communities than in the nation as a whole. For instance, with respect to election administration, in 2018, 63% of voters said elections in their community were administered very well, while only 21% said the same thing about elections across the country.
Americans consistently tend to view their local government more positively than the federal government. In a 2023 Pew Center survey, 61% of U.S. adults had a favorable view of their local government, while only 22% felt positively about the federal government – a difference of 39 percentage points. Gallup found a similar disconnect when asking about trust and confidence in local versus federal government.
Education. When it comes to education, U.S. adults tend to say the public schools in their community are doing better than the nation’s public schools as a whole, according to Education Next. In 2022, the latest year with available data, 52% of Americans said they’d give their local public schools an A or B “grade,” while only 22% said this about public schools nationally. This gap has existed for more than a decade, and it persists among Americans of different political orientations and even among teachers.
News media. Americans also express higher trust in their local media than in national media outlets – something Center surveys have found since 2016. Last year, 74% of Americans said they had at least some trust in the information that comes from local news organizations, but 59% said the same about information from national news organizations.
Crime and policing. Crime is another topic where Americans have long viewed the local and national pictures differently. Since 2000, Gallup has found that U.S. adults are much less likely to say crime is a serious problem locally than to say it’s a serious problem nationally. They’re also consistently much less likely to say crime is rising locally than nationally (even though crime rates today are much lower than in the early 1990s). On a related issue, Center data from 2023 shows that Americans gave local police higher ratings than police across the country on several measures.
Broader assessments. Even on the broadest of measures, Americans tend to rate their local communities more positively than the country overall. In a 2023 survey by the American Communities Project, 63% of Americans said their communities were going in the right direction, including majorities in every community type the researchers looked at. Meanwhile, only 18% of Americans said the country was going in the right direction. In some communities, the share who said this was as low as 10%.
What is behind this pattern?
It’s not entirely clear why Americans consistently express more positive views about local issues than national issues. Many people have some control over where they live – they choose locales and neighborhoods to suit their needs, tastes and budget – so it is understandable that they may have more positive views of their local community than of other places.
Similarly, Americans’ views of local issues (crime or education, for example) may be shaped by personal experience in a way that national issues are not: people are likely to be better informed about what is going on in their community as people experience the benefits of local government services first-hand.
By contrast, voters often only have indirect information about the role of the federal government—especially when it comes to government programs that are implemented halfway around the world. The fact that most Americans lack first-hand information about the nature and impact of USAID’s programs—combined with their lack of trust in non-local news sources—might explain why slashing USAID and international development assistance has been the first priority of federal officials intent on reducing federal government spending.
The content of this blog post is based on two original blog posts:
Jenn Hatfield. 2025. On issue after issue, Americans say things are going better locally than nationally. February 10, 2025: Pew Research Center.
Alan Yu, Allison McManus, and Laura Kilbury. 2025. How Trump’s Attack on USAID Undermines American Leadership and Security. February 5, 2025: Center for American Progress.
