Large majorities of U.S. adults support the role of the courts and Congress in serving as checks on presidential power, even though the public has less trust in all three branches of the federal government than it does in many other American institutions and professions, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

The policy center’s Institutions of Democracy survey finds that trust in the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to decline since the court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion codified in Roe v. Wade. Trust in the nation’s highest court has slid 27 percentage points since 2019, from 68% six years ago to 41% in March 2025. Nearly a third of those surveyed (32%) say they have no trust at all in the Supreme Court to operate in the best interests of “people like you.” In just the past 10 months, since May 2024, the percentage of those with no or low trust in that court grew to 59% from 55%.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center engaged SSRS to conduct the Democracy Study National Panel Wave 34 via a custom-recruited panel of non-institutionalized U.S. citizens aged 18 or older. Data were collected in three replicates from March 6–16, 2025, among a total sample of 1,363 respondents. Interviews were conducted via web (N=1,305), and telephone (N=58) interviews conducted in English (N=1,349) and Spanish (N=14). Data were weighted to represent the national population of U.S. adults ages 18 or older. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3.5 percentage points.