After Years of Abuses, Approval of the FBI and DOJ Depends on Who Is in Power

With government agencies turned into partisan weapons, trust is a tribal matter.

Nothing gives Americans greater faith in the rectitude of the state's enforcement apparatus than having their own political tribe in charge. In recent years, Democrats have viewed the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) positively when they believe their people are calling the shots, while Republicans have disapproved—only for the ratings to flip when the party in power shifts. More than anything, the seesawing numbers illustrate the degree to which so many government bodies have become political weapons in the hands of those in office, to be feared and loathed by those on the receiving end.

When Power Changes Hands, Opinions of Enforcement Agencies Flip

"As the Trump administration works to reshape and refocus the federal bureaucracy, Republican views of several key departments and agencies—the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services—have grown considerably more positive than they were a year ago," reports Pew Research. "Democratic views of these agencies have shifted in the opposite direction over this period, and in some cases even more starkly."

Specifically, 51 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents view the DOJ favorably, up 18 points from 2024. Among Democrats and Democrat-leaners, 28 percent now have a positive impression of the DOJ, down 27 points from last year. The FBI now gets thumbs-up from 54 percent of Republicans, up 17 points; 45 percent of Democrats view the Bureau favorably, down 21 points. A similar dramatic flip in partisan approval ratings has occurred for the Departments of Homeland Security, which has multiple enforcement roles, and Health and Human Services, which gained prominence during COVID.

Departments and agencies that aren't so overtly prone to political weaponization don't see such dramatic gaps in support. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats view the National Park Service favorably; 75 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats voice approval for the National Weather Service.

In 2023, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's Mood of the Nation Poll out of Penn State found that 30 percent of independents and 32 percent of Republicans "hardly ever" trust the FBI to do what is right, compared to 7 percent of Democrats. Seventy percent of Democrats trusted the FBI to do the right thing "most of the time" or "always" compared to 32 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of independents.

Of course, last year and since 2021, the Biden administration was in the White House and the executive branch was firmly in the hand of Democrats; now President Donald Trump and his Republicans are in power.

A History of Abuses on Behalf of the Powerful

Among Republicans, erosion in support for the FBI actually began during the first Trump administration, when the GOP was dominant but the Bureau went its own way in investigating the president. The FBI's efforts regarding Russiagate didn't exactly cover the Bureau—or the press outlets that covered the story—with glory. As Jeff Gerth noted in a post-mortem for the Columbia Journalism Review, "the end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no."

The Department of Justice Inspector General's report on the FBI investigation—described by The New York Times as "scathing"—concluded that the FBI had enough cause to initiate the investigation. It also found that agents seriously abused surveillance powers and played fast and loose with their authority.

There's nothing new about the FBI abusively snooping on Americans—that's been part of its stock in trade since its founding. In 1976, the Senate's Church Committee warned that the FBI "has placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than on organized crime and, according to some, let its efforts against foreign spies suffer because of the amount of time spent checking up on American protest groups."

Under the Biden administration, Republicans complained—with justification—about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents and the repeated federal, state, and local investigations and prosecutions of then-former President Trump for crimes including election interference. Trump frequently acts as if rules don't apply to him, but the long list of court cases looked very much like an effort to get him with anything that might stick. During that time, the FBI was also one of several agencies that leaned on social media companies to censor information the White House didn't like.

Once back in office, Trump promised to end the "weaponization of the federal government," but his administration's conduct looks more like exercises in payback. Former Trump national security adviser turned critic John Bolton's home was raided by an FBI very much under new management in search of classified documents. New York Attorney General Letitia James won office an anti-Trump platform and secured a sizeable civil fraud penalty against the then-former president; that penalty has since been overturned, and James is herself now the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation over mortgage fraud and two subpoenas regarding her conduct in office. Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) another Trump foe, is also under federal investigation for mortgage fraud.

Inevitable Rounds of Political Targeting

It's obvious at this point that whichever of the two major parties is in office will use the tools at hand—the DOJ and the FBI chief among them—as bludgeons against political opponents. Those whose team is in power approve of these agencies, and those out of power disapprove, because they have an established track record of targeting critics of whoever holds office, they're being used for that purpose right now, and they can be expected to be deployed in partisan fashion for the foreseeable future.

It's not that the politicians targeted by DOJ, FBI, and other federal agencies are necessarily innocent of the conduct for which they're investigated—or of others serious transgressions and moral failings. Anybody who follows events should, by now, have a strong sense that most people who seek coercive power over others through government office are horrible human beings. They're controlling, vindictive, intolerant of disagreement, and generally prone to misuse whatever authority they have.

But regular people get targeted too whether they're parents who object to school board policies or demonstrators in the streets. And, compared to members of the professional political class, regular Americans have fewer resources with which to fight back.

So, the constant, ongoing, and seemingly inevitable partisan abuse of powerful federal agencies should concern us all, whether or not our team currently has the whip hand. At some point, the wheels will turn, and those who did the targeting will themselves be targets.