Trump has polarized how the public views politicization

His supporters are coming to accept his way of governing

Here is a simple test: do you think of public employees should work for the public, or for a political party?

Until very recently, the vast majority of people, even those skeptical about government, would have said that a nonpartisan public service was better than a politicized one, and that giving politicians more control over public employees was a bad thing. Most people still believe that, but a growing number, mostly Republicans, believe politicians should be able to purge public employees for any reason.

For much of my career as a public administration professor, how the public thought about the public sector was a bit of an afterthought. Politicians from both parties broadly criticized the bureaucracy, but did little about it.

This has changed. Trump made attacks on the administrative state a central part of his political identity, and acted those claims in his second term. Most of these actions are, in my view, deeply damaging, but in this post I want to consider how it might have affected how the public thinks about government.

Philip Converse, Michigan Man

Trump has pushed Republicans to support politicization of the public sector. This was an area where there was broad opposition to politicization even as Trump demagogued the Deep State as a candidate. Now Republicans are more supportive of politicization and purges.

Conventional wisdoms about public opinion of government

Before we get into the data about changes in about politicization, here are some useful conventional wisdoms about trust in government. When people talk about trust in government, it is a) good to be specific (trust in what?) and b) be a little informed by what is driving those beliefs.

Trust in the federal government is lower than other levels of government, and other parts of society. It has also been declining over time. But much of distrust in government is distrust in national politicians, who are more visible and salient than state and local officials.

A while back I compiled agency level data collected over time which reflected these points. Trust in specific government agencies is relatively high in aggregate…

…though it varies by agency. Even so, the least popular agency, the IRS, is more favored than government as a whole. Trust in agencies sometimes drops, often during periods of negative media coverage, but usually recovers.

Another conventional wisdom is that because trust in government is driven by politicians, whoever is in the White House shapes that trust. And so, more Republicans now trust the federal government. Because their base level of trust in government is lower than that of Democrats, Trump is associated with an overall increase in trust in government, mostly driven by partisan effects. A recent Gallup poll saw a 24% increase in the perception that the federal government is effective since 2024.

Polarization around politicization

A new set of polls from the Partnership for Public Service provides insights into more changes in how the public thinks about the use of politicization. In previous years, these polls showed broad and bipartisan opposition to the type of politicization that Trump was promising, but had not yet implemented. Now that Trump is implementing these changes, these patterns have changed.

Here are the key data. Agreement with the statement “A nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy” was exceptionally high and bipartisan in 2024. About 9 out of 10 of both Democrats and Republicans agreed. Now 66% agree with that statement, a 21 percentage point drop, mostly driven by Republicans, who went from 87% to 66%, with an even larger drop among independents, from 79% to 34%.

Most people still disagree or are not sure that "Presidents should have the right to fill any government job with people that agree with their policies" but the change has moved in the direction of politicization. Only 1 in 4 supported that position in 2024, now it is 4 in 10. That is a big change in a short space of time.

The change is driven almost entirely by Republicans. In 2024 about one-third supported the pro-politicization view; in 2025 it was closer to two-thirds. Democrats and independents were mostly unchanged.

We see a similar but less dramatic change when the politicization is framed in more negative terms: “Presidents should be able to fire any civil servants that they choose for any reason.” A slim majority disagree with this statement in 2025, compared to 72% in 2024. Support for this position goes from 1 in 4 respondents to 1 in 3. Again, this is largely driven by Republicans. The wavering independents actually become less supportive of politicization in this poll.

In sum then, the public remains more opposed than supportive of Trump’s politicization of the public sector, but more supportive than they were before Trump started this project, largely because Trump supporters are becoming more aligned with his actions.

A political science explanation for this pattern is that Republicans have been Conversed.

Philip Converse was a University of Michigan (Go Blue!) political scientist who argued that public opinion follows party leaders rather than politicians follow public opinion. People don’t have well-defined views on many things, and so take their cues from parties and leaders, a pattern that may have become more powerful as polarization has become more intense.

In this example, the public had a fairly broad consensus view about politicization. That consensus cracked when Trump actually started to undermine the civil service.

What is most interesting to me is that Republicans adopted more pro-politicization views not when Trump complained about the Deep State, but when actually engaged in his project of politicization. Political rhetoric was one thing, but it was the actual action of politicization that pushed them to alter their views. They will get their news about this via a bubble, as we all do, but they heard about purges of federal employees and RIFs, and approved of this because they saw it as part of Trump’s governing plan. They rejected, or did not hear, the counterarguments about why it is dangerous to politicize the bureaucracy.

The implications are important. We are transitioning a country where the public generally agreed that politicization of public services was bad, to one where they reflexively follow the party line, even when the party line undermines the capacity of government to help them. That makes it much harder to repair the damage done.

The politicization-breeds-failure narrative

I asked Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, which commissioned the survey and has been doing exceptional work documenting the state of the federal workforce, for how he interpreted the data. He said:

Trump has weaponized partisanship and once the jerseys go on, historical agreement goes out the door. This appears to be happening with what was a consensus on the value of nonpartisan civil servants. I am, however, optimistic that this is a surface trend and that it can be reversed but that is largely gut rather than data talking.

If you want to lean into Stier’s cautious optimism, what might this look like? I think it would involve the confluence of two things. First, that consequences change people’s views. Trump’s talk about the deep state, by itself, did not alter views of politicization. His politicization actions did. It may be that the consequences of those actions will cause people to revise these views.

Second, people need to be able to connect specific public sector failures to Trump’s broad project of politicization. Trump has a readymade story to explain failures: they are other people’s fault — his opponents, advisors, or bureaucrats. This story has limited appeal but does resonate with his supporters, and they are the ones who have changed their minds.

The alternative story is that politicization breeds failure: it puts decisionmakers in bubbles where staff are afraid to question them; it sees competent people purged at the behest of social media nut jobs, replaced with less capable loyalists, or simply does not replaced at all; it removes checks on corruption.

The politicization-breeds-failure story has the benefit of being true, supported both by research evidence on the effects of politicization as well as example after example where Trump is undermining capacity. But the story still needs to be told. What this implies is that the media connects specific outcomes to broader actions: public sector failures occur in the context of politicization.

For example, Trump basically broke the Inspectors General system by firing anyone he disliked, not bothering to follow the minimal requirement to explain his reasoning to Congress. You don’t have to be an institutional theorist to see the problem with the President firing the people who, by law, are supposed to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in his administration. How hard is it for reporters to connect stories of these firings to stories of failure? (Of course we have fewer of those stories, because Inspectors General were one of the primary sources, which is why they are being fired). Anytime anything bad happens in these agencies, note that Trump fired the cop whose job it was to stop it from happening.

These stories can be told. Anyone who remembers Hurricane Katrina remembers how FEMA head Michael Brown became the personification of incompetent political hacks bungling important tasks. “Heckuva job Brownie” became a national punchline. A key difference between then and now is that Republican leaders still broadly bought into the idea that incompetent people should not be doing important jobs in ways that would embarrass the party. That standard no longer holds, partly because they do not observe media-driven political punishments for incompetence. Until they do, is is hard to expect a Converse-like recommitment to a neutral public service driven by party elites.

Trump has forcefully Conversed views in lots of areas, such as trade, our international alliances, the use of state power, and higher education. While he does so, Democrats are often pushed by advisers to redirect public attention to topics where they poll better. But what works in polling may not work in reshaping political narratives, and Democrats have not been shaping those narratives.

Democrats have an electoral interest in building and relentlessly hitting narratives where the public mostly agrees with them. This remains true for the politicization of public services. When they don’t push back, they lose that advantage, which is that the survey data suggests is happening. Adam Bonica makes a forceful case that Democrats should become the anti-corruption party, given how much this motivates voters and how strong the Democratic opportunities are. The politicization-breeds-failure narrative would be a core part of that transformation.

The bigger picture is that the public mostly disapproves of how Trump is managing the government. While he has gotten more of his supporters on board with the idea of politicization of the federal government, it remains one of his least popular aspects of his Presidency, polling only slightly better than tariffs.

Set aside the political calculations, if you care about the quality and competence of public services, and worry about the abuses and corruption we are seeing now, you also have a stake in reminding people why politicization is bad. It is everyone’s problem if we have a public service only built around responding to one party, and one man. This is something we used to agree upon.