Americans Still Trust Their Own Doctors, but Faith in Federal Health Agencies Slides

Americans’ confidence in their personal healthcare providers has remained remarkably resilient even as trust in the nation’s leading public health institutions has eroded sharply, according to new findings from a longitudinal, nationally representative survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. The survey, which has tracked public attitudes toward health information sources since April 2021, found that in August 2026, 87 percent of U.S. adults said they were confident that their doctor, nurse, or other primary healthcare provider provides trustworthy information about matters of public health. That figure is statistically unchanged from the 88 percent recorded in September 2024, suggesting that the relationship between patients and their own providers has weathered a period of extraordinary turbulence in American public health.

The contrast with federal health agencies could hardly be starker. Confidence in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as sources of trustworthy public health information declined significantly from stable highs of 72 to 76 percent in 2024 to just 59 to 64 percent in 2026. The decline occurred during 2025, following the beginning of President Donald J. Trump’s second term and the February 2025 confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the cabinet position that oversees all three agencies. The timing of the drop, documented across successive waves of the Annenberg Science and Public Health (ASAPH) survey, points to a period-specific shock to institutional trust rather than a gradual, long-term drift away from science-based institutions.

The numbers behind the decline reveal how deeply the erosion has cut. In August 2026, 61 percent of respondents expressed confidence in the CDC, significantly below the 72 percent who did so in September 2024. The share of Americans who said they were very confident in the CDC fell from 29 percent to 13 percent over that period, less than half of its earlier level. Confidence in the FDA stood at 59 percent in August 2026, down from 73 percent in September 2024, with the very confident share dropping from 23 percent to 11 percent. The NIH followed the same pattern, falling to 61 percent from 74 percent, while the proportion expressing high confidence declined from 27 percent to 12 percent. In each case, the drop in the strongly confident category was far steeper than the overall decline, indicating that many Americans did not abandon these agencies entirely but downgraded them from institutions they trusted without reservation to ones they trusted only with reservations.

As a result, the gap between Americans’ confidence in their personal healthcare providers and their confidence in the three federal public health agencies has widened dramatically. Although a confidence gap has existed since APPC first began asking the public health trustworthiness question in June 2023, that gap grew significantly during 2025 and has not recovered. In August 2026, the difference between trust in one’s own provider and trust in each federal agency stood at 26 to 28 percentage points, nearly double the 14 to 16 percentage point gap recorded in September 2024. Patrick E. Jamieson, director of APPC’s Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute, which oversees the health surveys, described the trend as concerning, noting that the gap doubled over the course of 2025 and has remained elevated since.

The survey findings directly challenge assertions made by U.S. health officials that declining trust in federal agencies reflects a broader disillusionment with the medical community as a whole. In December 2025, then FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, responding to a question about APPC’s previously reported decline in trust in the FDA, cited a 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open showing a decline in trust in hospitals and doctors from April 2020 through January 2024. That decline, however, occurred predominantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the inference that it signaled an ongoing trend of increasing disillusionment with medical institutions does not fit with the flat trend lines for trust in healthcare providers observed from 2023 onward in both the APPC dataset and the dataset underlying the JAMA Network Open study. The APPC data show that public confidence in one’s own provider has been both high and stable, undermining any claim that the agency trust decline is simply part of a generalized collapse in medical trust.

At the same time, Kennedy has publicly claimed that the administration is rebuilding confidence in the public health system. Speaking at a Tampa, Florida, elementary school on August 26, 2026, he told reporter Mitch Perry of the nonprofit Florida Phoenix that the administration is actually restoring faith in the public health agencies so that people will take their advice, adding that the advice is that people should get the measles vaccination. Laura A. Gibson, an APPC research analyst, responded that the survey data show no evidence that the Trump administration is restoring trust in the federal health agencies. The empirical record thus presents a direct tension between the administration’s rhetoric and the measured attitudes of the public it serves.

The period of declining trust coincided with significant upheaval in the leadership of the agencies themselves. In August 2025, CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez was fired and the CDC’s deputy director and chief medical officer, Dr. Debra Houry, resigned. More recently, the FDA lost both its commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, who stepped down in May 2026, and the head of its vaccine and biologics division, Dr. Vinay Prasad, who resigned in March 2026 after a turbulent tenure. Since the completion of the current survey, President Trump nominated Dr. Heidi Overton, deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, to become the new FDA commissioner. This cascade of departures at the highest levels of the public health bureaucracy provides visible context for a public that was simultaneously downgrading its assessment of the institutions those officials led.

The latest ASAPH survey was conducted August 4 through 17, 2026, among 1,904 U.S. adults, with an estimated margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. Interviews were carried out by SSRS, an independent research company, using both web and telephone modes among a nationally representative probability sample drawn from the SSRS Opinion Panel, with data weighted to represent the U.S. adult population. The September 2024 comparison survey was conducted September 13 through 30, 2024, among 1,744 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Earlier waves provide important historical context: in 2023, when the question concerned trustworthiness on matters of public health, confidence in personal providers ranged from 87 to 90 percent, and in 2021 and 2022, when the question focused on information about preventing and treating Covid-19, confidence in providers was slightly lower at 82 to 87 percent, though still higher than for the federal agencies. Data from 2021 on the federal agencies, when the question concerned trustworthy information about means of preventing and treating Covid-19, showed confidence levels of 71 to 77 percent, similar to the 2024 figures.

Ken Winneg, APPC’s managing director of survey research, emphasized the practical significance of the provider findings, saying that it is critical for the public to have a reliable source for healthcare information, and that it is a relief to see high and consistent trust in personal healthcare providers. That relief is tempered by the institutional picture. Public health agencies depend on public confidence to carry out vaccination campaigns, communicate safety warnings, and coordinate responses to outbreaks, and a sustained 26 to 28 percentage point trust deficit relative to personal physicians means that official health guidance now reaches many Americans at a significant credibility discount. The persistence of the gap through August 2026, more than a year after the initial 2025 decline, suggests that the erosion is not a transient reaction to a single controversy but a durable shift in how Americans rank their sources of health information.

The APPC has been tracking American public knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors regarding vaccination, Covid-19, influenza, RSV, and other consequential health issues through the ASAPH survey and other national samples since April 2021, under the auspices of the Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute. The research team includes Jamieson, Winneg, and research analysts Gibson and Shawn Patterson, Jr. Taken together, the five years of data tell a consistent story: the American public’s trust in the people who actually examine them, answer their questions, and prescribe their medications has been a stable anchor throughout a period of pandemic, political turnover, and institutional churn. Whether federal health agencies can rebuild the confidence they held as recently as 2024 remains an open question, but the survey makes clear that the pathway runs through demonstrated competence and continuity rather than through any generalized collapse of trust in medicine itself.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal survey research on U.S. public confidence in personal healthcare providers versus federal public health agencies

Article Title: Public confidence in one’s own healthcare provider remains high

Article References: Public confidence in one’s own healthcare provider remains high. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: public health, healthcare providers, CDC, FDA, NIH, public trust, Annenberg Public Policy Center, survey research, HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, health communication, vaccination