Americans trust federal scientists more than RFK, Jr., poll suggests

People in the U.S. trust scientists working at federal health organizations more than the agencies’ Trump administration–appointed leaders, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., according to a new poll released on Thursday.

Americans also trust independent health and medicine organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) more than U.S. health agencies. Poll respondents were more likely to accept the advice of the AAP about whether to vaccinate newborns against hepatitis B than that of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by a roughly 4 to 1 margin—with 42 percent who expressed trust in the AAP compared with 11 percent who said they would trust the CDC. The result comes after the agency, under the Trump administration, scrapped its long-standing recommendation that newborns receive the universal hepatitis B shot and instead advocated for babies to get the vaccine later in life.

The new survey, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, asked 1,650 U.S. adults who they trusted most on public health. Around 67 percent of respondents said they were confident in scientists 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 chief 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 poll respondents said they felt “very confident” that the leaders of the CDC, the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration provided trustworthy public health information. (The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

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

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

The poll underscores the Trump administration’s broader assault on scientists working at government health agencies. In the past year, the FDA, CDC and NIH have lost thousands of employees, including hundreds of scientists. Kennedy and other administration figures such as acting CDC chief and head of the NIH Jay Bhattacharya have pointed to mistrust in science as among the reasons for both the firings and the need to change American health policy, but the survey results suggest the public trusts them even less, says Georges Benjamin, chief executive officer of the American Public Health Association.

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

While scientists are still highly regarded in the U.S., polls have pointed to an overall decline in trust in them in the country since the COVID pandemic. A January Pew Research Center survey found that 61 percent of Americans believe that science “has had a mostly positive effect on society”—up slightly from 2023 but a decline compared with 73 percent in 2019. The sharpest drops in sentiment have been among Republican voters.

“On one side, 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 this trust,” says microbiologist Ferric C. Fang of the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It appears that most of the public are not fooled by this charade.”

Colette Delawalla, head of the Stand Up for Science scientific advocacy group, says the results are encouraging but notes that the survey respondents skewed toward wealthier, college-educated, political independents, which limits how applicable the results are to Americans as a whole. Jamieson suggests that the fact that the Annenberg Public Policy Center has weighted and gathered responses from the same respondents since 2021 should make the results of the latest survey more representative of overall U.S. opinion. “This is from the same people across time,” she says.

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