Satisfaction with government hits record high just before a new Trump admin 

Satisfaction with federal government services is at a seven-year high, according to a new government-focused study released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index on Tuesday. 

Now at 69.7 out of 100, citizen satisfaction is up by a net of nearly 10% over the last four years.

That’s the largest four-year gain since the ACSI first began measuring citizen satisfaction in 1999 and is at the highest it’s been since 2017, recovering from an all-time low of 63.4 in 2021. The measure is meant to serve as a cross-industry metric of how customers rate the quality of products and services in the United States. 

“This hasn’t been by chance,” the report’s authors note, pointing to “new laws, executive orders and mandates that have been instrumental to improving federal government satisfaction.”

Among those are the bipartisan 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, which pushes agencies to improve how people experience the government online. 

It was signed into law in 2018 under the first Trump administration and given accompanying implementation instructions during the Biden administration. 

Both administrations called for work on customer experience. 

The President’s Management Agenda under Trump included customer experience, and pilots to organize government services around life experiences as opposed to org charts, for example, started during the Trump administration before continuing into the Biden years.

The Biden administration also prioritized customer experience in its management agenda and issued a 2021 executive order focused entirely on the topic.

What happens to these and other efforts to improve how Americans interact with the government when Trump moves back into the White House again, though, isn’t totally clear. 

Some, including Brian Chidester at Adobe, are hopeful, noting the nonpartisan nature of the work thus far. 

One critical factor, however, is who serves in the Trump administration, a former government official who has worked across administrations told Nextgov/FCW. They asked not to be named so that they could speak freely. 

In the first Trump administration, “we definitely had people who believed in government functioning," they said, as opposed to a burn-it-all-down attitude. 

And the incoming administration’s plans to make swaths of the civil service essentially at-will employees by stripping them of civil service protections could also impact customer experience.

Trump has promised to reissue an executive order rescinded by Biden to do so, saying that he will “shatter the deep state” and “remove rogue bureaucrats.”

Don Moynihan — professor of public policy at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and expert on administrative burdens in government — predicted a “decline in competence” across agencies in a recent blog post, as some federal workers are fired and others decide to leave under the new administration.

One current federal employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, told Nextgov/FCW that they worry about their ability to recruit tech talent under a Trump administration.

“There’s a tone that the Republicans have taken that the government's bad and they’re going to go to war with the bureaucracy,” they said. “You have to lower the torque on some of your speech around the federal government and bureaucrats, or else no one's gonna want to come work.”

Hiring is already a chronic government problem. 

The wheels of government will need to keep turning regardless, said Jennifer Anastasoff, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Tech Talent Project, focused on increasing the government’s ability to recruit tech leaders. 

She’s hopeful about the government’s prospects for recruitment, pointing to the growth in government digital services over the last decade.

“People who are receiving services still need to receive their services. We still need to keep our promises to the American people,” said Anastasoff. “There are a good number of folks in our country who believe that that’s true and who are ready to step up.”

A government tech recruitment event held by the Tech Talent Project, Volcker Alliance and Office of Personnel Management last month had over 2,000 registrants, said Anastasoff, noting that those attendees didn’t know the outcome of the election at that point.

Moynihan is expecting a “decline in the quality of public services.”

Although the first Trump administration did some work on customer experience, “in other areas, Trump made public services worse,” Moynihan wrote. 

“He looked for ways to pour administrative burdens, such as work requirements, into every aspect of the social safety net,” his blog post continues. “His appointees made some loan forgiveness programs inaccessible. He fired the VA Secretary that deserved credit for improving performance there.”

The Trump administration also eliminated guidance for agencies to set goals and track progress on customer experience at the end of 2020, which the Biden administration later put back into place.

Another place to watch will be agency budgets and how they change under a Trump administration, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate.

The IRS, for example, has pinned its progress in delivering customer service basics — like answering calls from taxpayers and modernizing decades-old technology — at least in part to billions it got under the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Republicans’ first move with their then-new House majority in 2023, however, was to vote to repeal most of that money. Some of the money did get clawed back under a debt ceiling deal between Congress and the Biden White House in 2023.

Finally, the Trump campaign’s pledge to gut Biden administration efforts around equity could also affect customer experience moving forward, given that the Biden administration wove a focus on improving equity into its efforts to improve customer experience.

Still, there’s a way to make the case for customer experience regardless of who is in the White House and what their priorities are, said Martha Dorris, who previously worked at the General Services Administration for nearly 20 years and later founded Dorris Consulting International.

“Using customer experience strategies and best practices is really the way to be successful at the efficient and effective delivery,” she said. 

Federal employees should be ready to show the value of their programs and appeal to the priorities of the incoming administration, she said. 

“Hospitals need to run, and passports need to get processed and taxes need to be paid,” said Dorris. “This isn't about one blue or red. This is just about the operations of government and how efficient it can be.”