Only 50% of Americans say they trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to improve public health right now, down from 77% last year, according to a new poll released Tuesday by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation. And half of Americans trust federal public health recommendations less since President Donald Trump began his second term, the poll found.
The only group for whom trust in the CDC has increased over the past year are Republican voters — 67% this year, slightly up from 63% when the poll was conducted in April 2025.
Decline in trust is consistent among nearly all the subgroups in the poll of 2,205 U.S. adults. This includes men and women; white, Black and Hispanic people; those living in urban, suburban and rural locations; people with and without college educations; and Democrat and independent voters.
That partisan breakdown specifically is worrying, said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, adding that the data demonstrate a “deep polarization of facts and science.”
“We now live in a world where scientific fact is understood through a partisan lens,” he said, “and while we can make partisan differences between health facts, disease doesn’t discriminate.”
Measles, Ebola and hantavirus “don’t really care what we think,” he added. “If we don’t have a united response, that is extraordinarily dangerous for our country,” he said.
Castrucci said the relatively low but consistent rates of distrust among Republicans are unsurprising for a party that favors small government. Fourteen percent of Democrats approve of what federal public health agencies have been doing since the start of Trump’s second administration, compared with 80% of Republicans.
It remains to be seen if Republican support will drop further if and when there’s another Democrat in the White House, he added.
Trust in public health institutions has dropped before, but it hasn’t declined so substantially and so quickly in the same time period, said Gillian SteelFisher, director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program.
In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this poll found that trust in the CDC overall hovered between 74% and 78% from 2022 through 2025.
Under the Trump administration, including former anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, many people believe the CDC’s health recommendations are influenced by leaders’ personal beliefs, SteelFisher said. Sixty-eight percent of Americans said they agreed with that statement, while 66% said they believed federal public health agencies have focused “too much” on the wrong priorities.
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“People feel like decisions are being made without following standard practices and that makes people nervous,” she said. About 6 in 10 also said federal public health agencies have cut or scaled back programs or funding for health and medical research “too much.”
But polarization isn’t only a product of the current administration, she added.
“I think that we would look back at COVID and say, ‘OK, there’s lots of politics at play there too,” she said. “If you just say it’s just one party or the other, that’s a mistake.”
Misinformation spread by social media has also undermined the credibility of institutions, Castrucci said. The “monopoly” that scientists and doctors had on facts has been broken, he said, and public health officials haven’t yet adapted or found trusted messengers.
It’s important to note that pollsters asked the question about trust in the CDC behind two explicitly political questions that refer to eras before and during the Trump administration, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in this polling. That “increases the likelihood of polarized partisan answers to the third question,” she said.
What the poll shows is that how people are making health decisions are changing, she added.
If there’s a difference between health group recommendations, what do you do?
“The answer used to be there was no difference. I don’t have to do anything. I’m gonna do what they both say,” she said. “And now the answer is they trust the non-governmental organizations more than CDC.”
These findings are consistent with other research that’s shown declining levels of trust in federal public health leaders in general, especially in comparison to non-governmental health experts. A March poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that around three quarters of Americans or more are likely to trust the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association, all associations outside the federal government. Meanwhile, around 6 in 10 Americans said they found the CDC, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration trustworthy.
The new poll from Harvard and the de Beaumont Foundation found that though there have been declines, people trust state and local public agencies more than the CDC. Sixty-six percent of Americans say they trust their state health departments and 70% say they trust their local health departments — down from about 80% and 82%, respectively, in 2025.
Americans still broadly support routine childhood vaccinations, despite recent CDC changes to reduce the number of recommended shots for children, though there are still some partisan differences. While 96% of Democrats said routine childhood vaccines are “very” or “somewhat” safe, that drops to 85% among Republicans.
There’s widespread support for the CDC’s changes to the food pyramid. Nine in 10 Americans support the recommendations to avoid or sharply limit added sugar and highly processed food, while 85% support the recommendation to increase protein. A smaller share — 62% — supports the recommendation to increase consumption of beef and whole milk. About 80% of Americans say they agree that the new dietary guidelines “include advice that is widely agreed on, like eating whole ‘real food.'”
Scientists broadly agree that childhood vaccines are safe and effective, and also agree with the CDC’s advice to decrease sugar and processed foods and increase protein in their diets. Scientists don’t all agree on the administration’s recommendation to increase protein substantially, or to eat more beef and whole milk.
“Just because we don’t trust CDC doesn’t necessarily mean, as these data suggest, that we’ve abandoned the facts,” Castrucci said. “CDC has lost its cachet as a trusted messenger.”
