It’s common to hear Americans complain that federal agencies don’t work, that they’re sluggish and inefficient. In day-to-day conversations, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is often the go-to example for terrible experiences.
A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that only 23 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing “most of the time”—meaning that most people don’t trust the government will do its job well.
Major blunders undermine that trust even more, like when it was revealed earlier in June that due to gaping cybersecurity holes, Chinese hackers were able to siphon sensitive information from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on some 18 million current and past federal employees for more than a year.
