Biden’s Dilemma, Part 6: His Job Rating for Running Government Programs Is Falling

President Biden heads toward the 2024 presidential campaign with the federal government’s job rating in decline, support for a smaller government increasing, and the demand for major government reform at a 30-year high. This series of charts and graphs explores the current landscape when it comes to Americans’ views of government reform.

Joe Biden finished his first June in the White House with a 50% “excellent” or “good” rating for running the federal government’s programs. But he has lost ground in subsequent surveys, hitting 30% in January 2023. Biden still has time to strengthen his job ratings and reclaim the popularity he enjoyed earlier in his presidency, but he will need to stop the government breakdowns that deplete public confidence in his governing ability. 

Biden’s early job ratings were largely driven by his promise to repair a broken presidency, but he must also put government reform high on his agenda. At least for now, however, he has largely ignored the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic repair.  His policy agenda has largely eclipsed his commitment to the major reform that a solid majority of Americans support. 

The trend lines and analyses presented in this series come from stand-alone random-sample surveys conducted by Lake Research Partners, Maguire Research Services, the Pew Research Center, SSRS, and the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center. Occasional data points were also harvested from search engines managed by survey aggregators such as PollingReport.com, the Roper Center’s iPOLL database, and publicly available Pew Research Center surveys dating back to 1997. All survey findings were based on random-sample surveys of at least 1,000 respondents interviewed by cell phone and landline, with estimated error rates of 3% to 4% at a 95% confidence level.