How to Restore Trust in Government: Lessons From the Last Time We Did It

If you want to know how to restore trust in government, the answer isn’t speeches, and it isn’t demanding that citizens simply feel better about their institutions. History shows trust returns when government earns it through three things: transparency that lets people see how decisions are made, accountability that carries real consequences for betraying the public, and visible competence — services and promises delivered on time. America has rebuilt public trust before, and the playbook still works.

That answer sounds almost too simple, which is exactly why it’s worth taking seriously. We treat distrust as a permanent weather system, something that happens to us. It isn’t. Trust in government is a ledger, and every institution is either making deposits or withdrawals every single day.

Why did Americans stop trusting their government?

The polling tells a stark story. In the early 1960s, roughly three in four Americans said they trusted Washington to do the right thing most of the time. Today that figure hovers near one in five. The collapse wasn’t one scandal; it was a compounding series of withdrawals — a war sold on shaky premises, a presidency that ended in resignation, financial crises where the powerful were rescued and the ordinary were not, and a media economy that profits more from outrage than from accuracy.

Here’s the part we get wrong: the villain isn’t cynicism itself. Cynicism is a rational response to unaccountable power. The villain is the conclusion people draw from it — that nothing can change, so nothing is worth doing. That conclusion is historically false.

How to restore trust in government: what actually worked before

We have run this experiment. At the turn of the twentieth century, American government was arguably more corrupt than at any point since — senators openly purchased, city machines selling services, monopolies writing their own regulations. The Progressive Era answered with structural repair, not sentiment: the direct election of senators, ballot initiatives, exposure journalism that made corruption expensive, and civil service laws that replaced patronage with merit.

After Watergate, the country did it again. Congress passed campaign finance disclosure, inspectors general, a strengthened Freedom of Information Act, and open-meeting laws. None of these reforms were perfect. All of them shared a theory: trust follows verification. Citizens don’t need to believe their leaders are saints; they need the ability to check.

That theory is the beating heart of my Bull Moose series — it’s why the reformers in Tree of Liberty fight for daylight rather than revenge. The thriller plot is fiction; the mechanics of rebuilding trust are not.

What would restoring trust look like today?

Start where the leverage is. Transparency: real-time disclosure of money in politics, open data on how agencies perform, and plain-language explanations of decisions — not because sunlight is a slogan but because secrecy is where distrust compounds. Accountability: ethics rules with teeth, applied to every office, including the highest ones. And competence, the most underrated of the three: when the permit arrives on time, when the road gets fixed, when the agency answers the phone, trust rebuilds silently, one interaction at a time. Political scientists call this “performance legitimacy.” Citizens call it government doing its job.

Notice what’s not on the list: a hero. Waiting for one charismatic figure to restore trust is how trust gets broken again. Institutions that depend on the virtue of a single person are institutions designed to fail. The goal is a system sturdy enough that we don’t have to hope the people running it are angels.

Is it naive to think trust can come back?

It would be naive to think it comes back quickly, or without setbacks, or because we wish it so. It is not naive to think it comes back at all — that’s just history. Every generation of Americans has inherited institutions that looked broken beyond repair, and some of them chose repair anyway. The reformers who ended the spoils system and the staffers who drafted the post-Watergate laws were not optimists by temperament. They were builders who understood that distrust, left alone, curdles into something worse.

That’s the wager I make in my fiction, starting with the free prequel The Senate Deception: that the fight for trustworthy institutions is the most dramatic story in American life, precisely because it can be won. If you want to see how that argument unfolds across the whole series, the reading order is here.

Trust in government isn’t restored by asking people to be less cynical. It’s restored by giving their cynicism less to feed on. We’ve done it before. The tools are still on the shelf.

Frequently asked questions

How do you restore trust in government? Through transparency (letting citizens verify how decisions are made), accountability (real consequences for abusing office), and visible competence (delivering services reliably). Historical reform eras like the Progressive Era and the post-Watergate period rebuilt trust using exactly these tools.

Has public trust in government ever recovered before? Yes. Trust rebounded after Progressive Era reforms curbed machine corruption, and again in stretches of the postwar era when government visibly delivered. Recovery is slow and uneven, but the historical record shows it happens when institutions become more verifiable and more effective.

Why is trust in government so low today? Decades of compounding withdrawals: misleading justifications for wars, scandals ending in resignation, financial crises with unequal consequences, and a media environment that rewards outrage. Distrust is a rational response to unaccountable power — which is why structural reform, not messaging, is the remedy.

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About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.