Concerns About Government Have Trended Up

Public attitudes toward politics took a dark turn after the turn of the millennium.

 Frank Newport at Gallup:

Americans have a wide variety of responses when asked to name the most important problem facing the U.S., but a handful of problems usually stand out above all others.

In our latest update, from March, for example, only five categories received 5% or more of all mentions:

27% focused on concerns about government and poor leadership.
19% cited a generic “the economy” (although a number of other responses were economic in nature).
14% were focused on concerns about immigration.
9% named the high cost of living or inflation.
5% mentioned unifying the country.

All other individual categories (there were 45 in total) received 4% or less of all mentions. (The complete list is appended in the link at the bottom of this article.)

In this space, I’m going to focus on the “government” category, looking at trends in its prevalence over time and making use of Americans’ word-for-word responses to gain insights into what the people are telling us when they name government as the country’s top problem.

Cyber-Orwell

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

And so it begins...

Tiffany Hsu at NYT:

Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website.

They weren’t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.

Thousands of other government web pages had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets are gone, some of the experts who produced them were dismissed, and many mentions of words like “Black,” “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated.

Jon Swaine and Jeremy B. Merrill at WP:

For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.

Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.

The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.

The executive order that President Donald Trump issued late last month directing the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate “divisive narratives” stirred fears that the president aimed to whitewash the stories the nation tells about itself. But a Washington Post review of websites operated by the National Park Service — among the key agencies charged with the preservation of American history — found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past.

Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division. The Post compared webpages as of late March to earlier versions preserved online by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

 

Rural Areas and Legal Deserts

Many posts have dealt with the problems of rural America.

Michelle Paxton at ABA:

Rural communities severely lack access to attorneys, a phenomenon known as legal deserts. Data from the American Bar Association for the year 2020 revealed that 1,300 counties in the United States have less than one attorney per 1,000 residents, and many have no attorneys whatsoever. Residents are required to drive for hours to access basic legal services to handle even routine matters. Despite efforts by many states to increase access to justice for rural America, a scarcity of rural attorneys continues. The stakes are exacerbated when rural children and families are involved in the juvenile court system due to the fundamental interests at issue. There is a lack of attorneys available to serve in juvenile court, and those willing may not have access to the necessary formal and informal supports needed to become effective advocates in child welfare and youth justice. Without these supports, attorneys may opt out of juvenile cases, and as a result, outcomes for children and families deteriorate.

California's Housing Failure

Many posts have discussed differences among the states, with special emphasis on California and Texas.

The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California

Evidence and Policy Recommendations Jason M. Ward, Luke Schlake

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3743-1.html

In this report, the authors present analyses of production cost differences among privately funded, market-rate apartments and publicly subsidized affordable apartments in California, Colorado, and Texas using a sample of cost data on more than 140 completed projects to identify drivers of higher costs in California policy reforms that can lower production costs and increase housing affordability in the state.

Key Findings

• California is the most expensive state for multifamily housing production in every cost category the authors considered.
• Longer production timelines are strongly associated with higher costs. The time to bring a project to completion in California is more than 22 months longer than the average time required in Texas.
• Municipal impact and development fees vary substantially across states; they are $1,000 per unit on average in Texas, $12,000 per unit in Colorado, and $29,000 per unit in California.
• Key drivers of the remarkably high cost of publicly subsidized affordable housing production in California include requirements for affordable housing developers to pay substantially above-market wages and unusually large architectural and engineering fees, likely related to highly prescriptive design requirements.
• Within California, production costs vary substantially across metropolitan regions—the average cost per square foot in San Francisco is roughly 1.5 times the average cost in San Diego.
• Halving the difference in market-rate production costs between California and Texas could reduce rental prices for new apartments in California by roughly 15 percent.
• If California had Colorado’s production costs for publicly subsidized affordable apartments, the roughly $1.25 billion in recent spending by the state’s four largest funding programs would have produced more than four times as many units.

Trade War Casualties

 

.@The_Budget_Lab has already put out revenue, distributional, inflation, and GDP estimates of the tariffs from yesterday.

-$3,800 hit to average income and $1,700 hit to low-income families when combined with other 2025 tariffs.

-2.3% increase in prices

-0.6% smaller economy pic.twitter.com/Jx3S0lKQL1

— Brendan Duke (@Brendan_Duke) April 3, 2025

Booker's Marathon Speech

Victor Feldman at Roll Call:

New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker on Tuesday evening broke the record for the longest floor speech in the Senate’s history with a marathon speech taking aim at the Trump administration’s policies and efforts to downsize the federal government.

Booker continued speaking after surpassing the 24-hour-and-18 minute record set in 1957 by South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond. Booker yielded the floor after holding it for 25 hours and four minutes, according to the Senate Periodical Gallery.

The senior senator for New Jersey acknowledged the moment as Democrats on the floor cheered.

“The man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand … I’m not here though because of his speech, I’m here despite his speech,” Booker said of Thurmond, the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican and foe of the Civil Rights Act.

Channeling the spirit of the late Georgia Democratic House member and civil rights activist John Lewis, Booker had held the Senate floor since Monday night in what he called an effort to stir up “good trouble.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said in his familiar booming voice Monday evening. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.”

 

Injunction Junction

Many posts have discussed the power of the courts.

Miles's Law: where you stand depends on where you sit.

Sophia Cai at Politico:

Trump and his allies have in recent weeks called for the impeachment of at least five federal judges who have issued injunctions against administration actions, including DOGE moves to gut the federal government. But in past years, especially under JOE BIDEN’s administration, those same Trump allies celebrated judicial injunctions.

Two years ago, Trump praised a federal judge’s ruling which blocked the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies. “Just last week in a historic ruling, a brilliant federal judge ordered the Biden administration to cease and desist from their illegal and unconstitutional censorship and collusion with social media,” he said at a Turning Point Action summit.

In December, Trump applauded when a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from disposing of materials used for Trump’s promised Southern border wall before his inauguration. And in 2021, STEPHEN MILLER’s America First Legal Foundation asked for injunctions against the Biden administration, including one on the federal employee Covid-19 vaccine mandate.

In 2016, Josh Gerstein reported at Politico:

Conservative states are succeeding in getting friendly federal judges to issue broad—often nationwide—injunctions reining in federal government actions, thwarting key parts of President Barack Obama’s agenda and imperiling some aspects of Hillary Clinton’s platform.

The tactic—amplified by the 4-4 deadlock in the Supreme Court—has already frozen Obama’s immigration policy, is limiting his efforts to protect transgender rights and could hamstring Clinton’s planned executive actions on immigration, labor and environmental issues if she wins the White House.

The shorthanded Supreme Court is expected to start adding new cases to its docket as soon as Thursday, with the new term set to open Monday. But many legal experts say that if the high court remains split down the middle on key issues, the more important action will be in the lower courts, where the red-state-led onslaught is playing out..

In its waning days, the Obama administration is continuing to push back against the conservative legal assault, with the Justice Department repeatedly opposing nationwide injunctions and pressing judges to rein in their rulings.

...

Nonetheless, some liberal legal activists seem reluctant to deplore the conservative states’ tactics. The reason: civil rights and immigrants’ advocates have long visited the courtrooms of federal judges to seek sweeping rulings looking to alter federal policy across the country.

“A single case involving a single judge can issue an injunction against nationwide laws or policies and they have always done that. That’s the way our legal system works,” said Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “It’s almost as if conservatives figured this out after progressives did....It’s really not new.”