The Pew Research Center has aggregated decades of polls tracking the public’s trust in government. The high mark on the chart is in 1964, when 77 percent of the public believed that the government would do the right thing all or most of the time. Confidence plummets from there. In the ’70s, after Watergate, it sits in the 30s. It rebounds into the 40s in the ’80s and briefly brushes the 60s after 9/11, but the downward trend is undeniable. By 2023 it sat at 16 percent.90 This is not, in our view, attributable solely or even mainly to cumbersome government processes. But the collapse in trust
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