Americans trust federal scientists more than RFK, Jr. suggests

Americans trust federal scientists more than RFK, Jr. suggests

By Dan Vergano edited by Claire Cameron

People in the United States trust researchers working at federal health agencies more than the agencies’ Trump administration-appointed heads, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., according to a new poll released Thursday.

Americans also trust independent health and medicine organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) more than US health agencies. Survey respondents were more likely to accept the advice of the AAP on whether to vaccinate newborns against hepatitis B than that of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by a margin of about 4 to 1 – with 42 percent expressing confidence in the AAP compared to 11 percent saying they would trust the CDC. The result comes after the agency, under the Trump administration, scrapped its longstanding recommendation that newborns receive the universal hepatitis B shot and instead advocated for babies to receive the vaccine later in life.

The new survey, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, asked 1,650 American adults who they trusted most about public health. About 67 percent of respondents said they were confident in researchers working at federal health agencies such as the CDC, while less than half — 43 percent — said they felt confident in the heads of those same agencies. More survey respondents (54 percent) said they trusted former National Institutes of Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, a frequent target of partisan vitriol, than those who said they trusted Kennedy (38 percent).

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Meanwhile, only 5 percent of respondents said they felt “very confident” that the heads of the CDC, National Institutes of Health or the US Food and Drug Administration were providing reliable public health information. (The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

“People seem to have paid enough attention to the news to see that maybe there’s a discrepancy between what the career scientists would say and what the agency leadership would say,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, “even if the scientist can’t talk to you right now.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment Scientific American.

The survey underscores the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on researchers working at public health agencies. In the past year, the FDA, CDC and NIH have lost thousands of employees, including hundreds of researchers. Kennedy and other administration figures such as acting CDC chief and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have pointed to distrust of science as one of the reasons for both the resignations and the need to change American health policy, but the survey results suggest that the public trusts them even less, said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

“The public is pretty smart; they can see that these agencies have been politicized,” says Benjamin. “They can see that career scientists are acting in the public interest based on evidence and scientific findings, not from partisan motives.”

While scientists remain highly regarded in the United States, polls have pointed to a general decline in trust in them in the country since the COVID pandemic. A survey by the Pew Research Center in January found that 61 percent of Americans believe that science “has had a mostly positive effect on society” — up slightly from 2023, but down from 73 percent in 2019. The sharpest falls in sentiment have been among Republican voters.

“On the one hand, we have scientists and public health officials who are guided by evidence. And on the other, we have ideologically motivated individuals who falsely claim that the public has lost trust in scientists and that only they can restore that trust,” says microbiologist Ferric C. Fang of the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It seems that most of the public is not fooled by this charade.”

Colette Delawalla, head of science advocacy group Stand Up for Science, says the results are encouraging, but notes that survey respondents skewed toward wealthier, college-educated, political independents, limiting the applicability of the results to Americans as a whole. Jamieson suggests that the fact that the Annenberg Public Policy Center has been weighting and aggregating responses from the same respondents since 2021 should make the results of the latest survey more representative of general American public opinion. “These are from the same people over time,” she says.

Editor’s Note (3/5/26): This story is in development and may be updated.

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