The Participation Blog

Government Shutdown Blues

We talk about (re)building trust in government a lot in this newsletter and it will be interesting to watch the long-term reputation ramifications of the partial government shutdown – still underway, as of this writing. Public trust in government continues to erode and increasingly permeates down into state and local public entities that, in the past, have been viewed as impartial – people just don’t trust institutions. Now, weeks into a federal shutdown that, arguably, hasn’t made a big difference in most non-government employees’ lives, there are questions about whether or not taxpayers view their public servants with sympathy or even more disdain. Regardless of the effect of the shutdown, this ABCD trust model is a nice way of thinking about rebuilding public trust in what you do for a living.