Faith Healers

onica Lewinsky. Say that name, and you've started a conversation about politics, power and trust. The White House scandal has dominated public discourse this year, spurring hyperbolic debates over the erosion of the nation's faith in the office of the President. All the President's advisers are sorting out what effect the Lewinsky affair will have on Americans' opinions of Washington and on the Clinton legacy.

But beyond this fleeting scandal, outside the White House gate, in the trenches of federal departments and agencies, civil servants are struggling to regain the trust of the American people after a 30-year decline in public satisfaction with government. Vice President Al Gore and his reinvention team have made restoring the public trust the keystone measure of federal management success. "Restoring the faith of Americans in their government will be tough," Gore wrote in his 1997 National Performance Review report. "The only way agencies can make this happen is by convincing their customers, one by one, that things have changed."

A new survey gives the government's faith healers hope: While the bureaucracy alone cannot restore the nation's faith, civil servants' attitudes, performance and efficiency do have a substantial effect on the public trust.

Six of 10 Americans say they basically do not trust the federal government, according to a poll of 1,762 citizens released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press March 9. By contrast, in 1964, three-quarters of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing always or most of the time. This year's Pew poll set out to determine what effect government performance has on public satisfaction with Washington. The poll explored potential causes for the wide-scale dissatisfaction with the public sector: political leadership, the political system, tax levels, specific federal policies, general dissatisfaction with life, lack of interest in politics, and government performance.

Deconstructing Distrust

The poll found no either/or, black-and-white, dominant reason Americans don't trust government. For example, the percentage of people who don't consider the quality of their lives to be very high (62 percent) corresponds with the percentage of people who say they have a mostly or very unfavorable opinion of the federal government (59 percent). In addition, 40 percent of people who say they distrust the government blame poor political leadership, citing dishonesty, greed and ineptitude as traits of Washington politicians. Adding to the potential causes of distrust, 56 percent of Americans agree that federal regulations are too intrusive, 52 percent say they pay more than their fair share of taxes, and 46 percent think what happens in Washington is of little concern to most people.

As Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, wrote in the introduction to Why People Don't Trust Government (Harvard University Press, 1997), "If the public reaction to government had a clear, one-to-one relationship with performance, there would be little to explain why attitudes have changed over the past three decades. But the ambiguities in the relationship between real and perceived performance, along with the decline of confidence in other major institutions besides government, suggest that larger causes are also involved."

Government performance does factor into the equation, as 24 percent of people who don't trust government pick poor federal management as the main reason. But that's in contrast to the 40 percent of people who blame politicians. The Pew Center's study found a more striking relationship between performance and trust by examining the data more closely.

The Pew researchers showed that three-fourths of the people who say the federal government performs well also trust the government to do the right thing always or most of the time. Meanwhile, 91 percent of people who say the government does a poor job managing its programs think Washington will never or only some of the time do the right thing. That suggests a direct correlation between trust and performance.

While Americans' views of their political leaders are still the major factor in public trust, the Pew study shows that government performance matters.

"The relationship between trust and performance has been looked at more carefully in this research than in previous research," says Kim Parker, research director at the Pew Research Center.

Frustrated Public

When senior executives look at how Americans rate federal agencies' performance, they should either lower their heads in shame, figure out how to foster better media relations, or both. Americans base their impression of the federal government on what they've heard or read three times as often as they base their opinions on personal experiences.

Overall, when the Pew poll asked Americans how well the federal government runs its programs, 75 percent said the bureaucracy does an "only fair" or poor job. A third of those polled cut federal managers some slack, conceding that the government often does a better job than it's given credit for. But most of the other two-thirds felt no sympathy. Sixty percent of respondents said criticism of the way the federal government does its job is justified.

Poor management is a greater source of public dissatisfaction than other factors observers commonly cite, the survey says. For example, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans think the federal government has the right priorities but runs programs inefficiently. Similarly, a safe majority of the public says the government is the right size and should be maintained to deal with important problems. In other words, Americans don't think the government is too big. "The public's appetite for government activity has not diminished since the 1960s," Parker says.

Furthermore, most Americans don't think a large-scale overhaul would solve federal management problems. Though 37 percent of respondents told Pew major reform is necessary, 58 percent said the government is basically sound. That nuance reflects Americans' distaste for radical change. It also indicates why the public's opinion of government has been improving since 1994.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, just 21 percent of Americans said they trusted Washington. But Republicans' calls for the elimination of whole departments and government shutdowns made people begin to appreciate government. Republicans misread public sentiment, Parker says. Americans were seeking not smaller but more responsive government. The Vice President attributes the rise in trust from 21 percent in 1994 to 38 percent in 1997 to federal agencies' reinvention efforts, which, he says, are beginning to chip away at Americans' hardened attitudes.

Americans still think federal management could be improved. While 64 percent of respondents agreed that when something is run by the government, it is usually wasteful, only 7 percent think the government is inherently and inevitably inefficient. Ninety-two percent don't buy the born-to-be-bureaucratic argument; they believe government can be more efficient.

Americans' belief that the federal government can do a better job fuels their frustration with Washington. When asked if they are basically content with, frustrated with, or angry with the federal government, 56 percent of respondents said they were frustrated. Frustration, at least, is better than anger. Better performance can quell frustration. Anger, on the other hand, can spawn violent and hostile attitudes toward government, like those of militia groups. Twelve percent of Americans said they were angry with the government, less than half the percentage who said they were basically content.

Fuzzy Details

Americans tend to demonstrate little knowledge of the details of federal governance. In the Pew poll, 63 percent of respondents thought foreign aid consumed more of the federal budget than Medicare. Similarly, 34 percent of the public knew the federal workforce has been downsized, but 35 percent said the number of people working for Uncle Sam has increased over the last three years.

The public's low scores on federal knowledge suggest their opinions are based more on general beliefs and attitudes than on actual experiences or facts. For example, just 38 percent of Pew poll respondents said they had a favorable opinion of the federal government. But 57 percent said they have a favorable opinion of "elected federal officials" and 59 percent had a favorable opinion of the "departments and agencies of the federal government." When specific agencies were mentioned, including the Social Security Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Defense Department, no program was given less than a 62 percent favorable opinion.

"The public may not like the federal government as an abstract concept," Parker says. "But when you talk about specific programs, Americans tend to have more favorable views. People appreciate what's done at the agency level."

While a majority of Americans have most likely never heard of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, the public recognizes how hard it is to place blame for federal programs' failure or success. Pew asked respondents to rate the government's performance on specific policy areas, including conserving the nation's natural resources, providing a decent standard of living for the elderly, protecting food and drug safety, and reducing juvenile delinquency.

A majority in every area except food and drug safety gave the government failing marks on the results of federal programs. Pew then asked people why they thought the government had not succeeded. In nearly every area, half of respondents said the issues are complex and difficult to solve, while half said the government could have done a better job.

As agencies get ready to demonstrate how federal programs affect certain outcomes, public administrators can pull a nugget of wisdom from Americans' responses to the causes of poor performance. The public takes the realistic view that the federal government can only do so much to alleviate the more intransigent problems facing the country.

Just as the causes of public dissatisfaction are hard to determine, the consequences of Americans' distrust are equally difficult to gauge. The Pew poll found no clear-cut serious consequences of public dissatisfaction. While Americans overall do not vote in great numbers, just as many people who distrust the government vote as do people who trust the government, the poll found. Patriotism is unaffected as well. Ninety percent of Americans agree with the statement, "I am very patriotic." Similarly, people who trust and people who don't are equally enraged when people claim federal benefits to which they aren't entitled.

However, distrust breeds skepticism toward public officials, the Pew researchers concluded. Seventy-one percent of people who distrust Washington said public officials don't care what average Americans think, compared with 44 percent of those who trust. In the extreme, people who don't trust government are slightly more likely to believe violence against the government may be justified in some cases. Still, 77 percent of people who trust the government and 67 percent of people who distrust Washington say violence against the government is never justified.

Restoring the Faith

The good news for federal employees is that Americans are four times more likely to trust civil servants than to trust politicians. The bad news is that federal employees rate the government's performance no better than the rest of Americans do. Gore and his reinvention revolutionaries may have to do more than make the body politic believe in government. The NPR's faith healers may have to first restore the federal workforce's confidence in itself.