Satisfaction with government services rises, despite recent layoffs and turmoil

Citizen satisfaction with the federal government continues to rise, despite 10 months of headlines about government layoffs and the work of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to new findings released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index on Tuesday.

The results put satisfaction with federal government services at 70.4 out of 100, a 19-year high.

“I think we were all a little bit surprised … given all the turmoil in the federal government in the first six or seven months of the year,” Forrest Morgeson, director of research emeritus at the ACSI, told Nextgov/FCW. “It’s counterintuitive.”

Satisfaction ratings — meant to serve as a cross-industry metric of how customers rate the quality of products and services in the United States — fell every year for the government between 2017 and 2021 before starting to rise in 2022. The latest measure is based on a survey of 6,914 people conducted during the 2025 fiscal year, before the recent government shutdown.

“Amid workforce reductions, shifting citizen expectations, and rapid digital transformation, federal agencies continue to demonstrate resilience, adaptability, and an unwavering commitment to excellence in public service,” the report reads. It also pins the continued upward trajectory on new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The review includes breakdowns by top agencies. The Agriculture Department got the highest satisfaction score — 77 — followed by the State Department, which improved by 6% over the last year to land at 75. The report’s authors trace that to efforts at the agency’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to launch a digital passport renewal process last fall.

But like the approximately 300,000 feds expected to leave the government by the end of the year, a key leader in that passport modernization effort left their post over the summer. And 18F, the government technology consultancy housed at the General Services Administration that was helping the Bureau of Consular Affairs with the modernization, was shuttered completely in March.

The first Trump administration and the Biden administration both made efforts to improve customer experience. And Trump 2.0 has championed some of its current customer service projects, like modernizing the federal employee retirement system after Elon Musk took an interest in its reliance on paper while pushing feds to take voluntary early retirements. 

Trump also signed an executive order in August setting up a new “America by Design” initiative meant to improve how Americans experience the government.

But while the initiative includes a hiring push for new designers, it follows the administration laying off many from government tech teams that were doing such work, like 18F. 

It could be difficult to replace the loss of critical skills in AI or design, said Martha Dorris, who previously worked at the General Services Administration for nearly 20 years and later founded Dorris Consulting International.

Customer experience work “seems to have lost high-level political support, as the current Trump administration is much more focused on downsizing,” said Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “While DOGE has promised AI-based improvements soon, the reality today is large layoffs in customer-facing roles in agencies like IRS and Social Security.”

Moynihan also noted that who is satisfied may depend on who you ask, as the public tends to be more supportive of the government when it is run by the party that they support.

Metrics on the actual delivery of government services, such as call wait times or benefit processing times, could be a helpful yardstick in measuring changes over time, although they often aren’t available, said Dorris. 

And even when they are, such data can be contentious. The Social Security Administration’s recent data for phone wait times have come under fire from Democrats and SSA experts for being misleading.