Annually the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) conducts studies on customer satisfaction in regards to services provided by different federal agencies and the 2021 report shows that just 64 percent of people were satisfied with the service Social Security provided.
Each of the agencies likely went down in customer satisfaction in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic when many agencies closed and moved to working from home. The report indicated that customer satisfaction was down close to 3 percent in all areas compared to a year ago.
A portion of the report follows explaining the different scores each of the federal agencies received in relation to customer satisfaction. The complete survey can be found here.
The ACSI federal government citizen satisfaction score represents an aggregation of citizen experiences with dozens of widely used programs and agencies that are part of different citizen-facing federal departments. Some provide benefits or free/low-cost services experienced by citizens, while others are predominantly regulatory by nature, monitoring citizen compliance with federal rules, regulations, and laws. Given this, citizen satisfaction tends to differ widely across federal departments. The significant variance among federal departments is largely explained by the nature of their missions.
In 2021, the Department of the Interior (77) leads the way in citizen satisfaction and is the only federal department that exceeds the economy-wide national ACSI average (73.7 as of the third quarter of 2021). Four other departments—the Department of Health and Human Services (71), the Department of Agriculture (70), the Department of Commerce (70), and the Department of Defense (70)—score in the 70s but significantly below the national ACSI average. The remaining departments come in well below this mark. Perennial laggard the Department of the Treasury (54), which interacts with citizens primarily through its inherently unpopular tax collection mission, places dead last.
