Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

java-man

Who are these 11%?

Webstir

But, not the politicians I voted for. It's always the other guys.

swed420

Related: New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026) https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

add-sub-mul-div

I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.

autoexec

Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.

tekla

Note the numbers between 2010 and 2025 were in the 72% to 79% range if you read the article. So numbers have not actually increased that much.

throw0101a

Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt. By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index * https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).

surfmike

The most blatant recent case is Trump selling early access to his Truth Social posts https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

If this is the question they asked: Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not? Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question. They should have broken it down a bit more.

xnx

"Drain the swamp". Everything is projection. What they say about the Democrats is what they are or aspire to be.

jghn

Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.

pseudosavant

Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.

sublinear

I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso. Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.

amazingamazing

> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not? How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey? If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.

chris_wot

I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!

lovich

I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now. They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President. Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane). It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2. At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.

mberning

The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.

jimt1234

Citizens United. Nothing else to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

giantg2

Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.

trashface

The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)