Public Attitudes on U.S. Intelligence (2023-2024)

In December 2025, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs published the results of two annual polls sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin. The university’s 2023 and 2024 national surveys of public attitudes confirm that most Americans believe the U.S. intelligence agencies are vital to protecting the nation and effective in carrying out their specialized tasks. These final polls of the Biden presidency also affirm that partisan preference plays a significant role in shaping views on the intelligence community’s (IC’s) performance, respect for civil liberties, and democratic oversight.

Over the six-year span of this study, efforts to improve transparency and public understanding of the U.S. IC have not overcome widespread public concern that the country’s security agencies fail to adequately safeguard citizens’ privacy rights and civil liberties. Key takeaways from the report, a sample that depicts overall public views on U.S. intelligence, and its conclusion appear below. The full report, along with underlying survey data, is available here.

Key Takeaways

• Most Americans believed that U.S. intelligence agencies are necessary and play a vital role in protecting the nation (62 percent in 2024).
• Relatively few Americans believed the IC is no longer needed (5 percent in 2024), but a sizable number (12 percent in 2024) of Americans expressed concern that the intelligence agencies represented a threat to their civil liberties.
• An overwhelming majority of Americans rated the intelligence agencies as highly effective in accomplishing core missions like preventing terror attacks (83 percent) and discovering the plans of hostile governments (80 percent). However, fewer than half of Americans believed the IC was effective in protecting their privacy rights (48 percent).
• Partisan differences described in previous reports were present in the 2023 and 2024 data and appear more deeply entrenched in public attitudes toward U.S. intelligence. Americans’ views on the effectiveness, respect for privacy rights, and institutional oversight of the intelligence agencies were each notably impacted by partisan affiliation.
• Four in 10 Americans learned about U.S. intelligence from traditional media sources, while one in four relied on social media. Age plays the most significant role in news sources, with older Americans following traditional print and electronic outlets and younger cohorts citing social media sources—only 1 percent of Americans said they relied on popular culture portrayals of U.S. intelligence.

Views on the U.S. Intelligence Community

Our most recent surveys reflect that roughly six in 10 Americans believe that the IC plays a vital role in warning against foreign threats and contributes to national security (58 percent in 2023, and 62 percent in 2024) (see Figure 1). This solidly favorable view has been consistent over the six-year span of this study. In 2023 and 2024, as in previous years, men expressed slightly more favorable views of the IC, compared to women. The level of support for U.S. intelligence agencies also correlates quite closely with age. Older Americans were more likely to view the IC as necessary. For example, in 2024, 70 percent of “Boomers” and 68 percent of “Gen Xers” described the IC as vital to U.S. national security, while 52 percent of “Millennials” and 57 percent of “Gen Z” Americans expressed that view.

Support by White (63 percent) and Black (66 percent) Americans was uniform and high in 2024, while the level of support by Hispanic Americans (48 percent) continued to lag. Furthermore, in both 2023 and 2024, Americans categorized as “High Knowledge” were more likely to regard the IC as vital than less informed participants. The survey respondents were asked two questions to evaluate their knowledge of foreign affairs: (a) Who is the current president of Turkey? and (b) Who is the current president of France? Respondents who answered both questions correctly were grouped into the “high knowledge” category.

Relatively few Americans believed that the IC was no longer needed (just 5 percent in 2024). Even among more “security skeptical” age cohorts like Millennials and Gen Zers, there was little appetite for shuttering the IC.

In line with historic levels of concern, one in eight Americans (12 percent in 2024) described the IC as a “threat to Americans’ civil liberties.” Self-identified political independents and Republicans were most inclined to regard the IC as a threat to civil liberties. For example, in 2024, 18 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans highlighted that threat, while only 6 percent of Democrats described the IC in these terms.

The proportion of Americans who have no opinion or lacked the information needed to shape a view of the IC has proved remarkably stable since 2017 at roughly one in five, fluctuating within a narrow range between 20 and 24 percent over the life of this study. Significantly more women (28 percent in 2024) than men (15 percent) admitted they knew little about the IC. Higher numbers of Hispanic Americans (33 percent) than White Americans (19 percent) and Black Americans (21 percent) cited a lack of information on U.S. intelligence in the 2024 survey.

Our previous report—informed by 2021 and 2022 surveys, and in the wake of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory—highlighted partisan differences in public perceptions of U.S. intelligence. Support for the IC increased among Democrats after Biden’s election, ranging between 69 percent and 73 percent throughout his administration (2021 to 2024). Although the percentage of Republicans viewing the IC as vital increased in the last two years of the Biden administration, it remained lower than the percentage of Democrats, ranging between 51 percent and 67 percent in the last four years. We also note that the number of Republicans who viewed the IC as a threat to civil liberties increased after Democrats gained control of the White House, peaking in 2022, but followed by a decline in 2023 and 2024.

To further explore the influence of political preferences on public attitudes toward U.S. intelligence, we began asking survey participants in 2021 to describe their views on then-President Biden (see Figure 2). During each year of the Biden presidency (2021 to 2024), more than seven in 10 Americans who “approved” or “strongly approved” of Biden described the IC as vital, while approximately half of those who “disapproved” or “strongly disapproved” of Biden expressed support for the IC. The same Americans who disapproved of Biden were also two to three times as likely as Biden’s supporters to describe the IC as a threat to civil liberties. For example, in 2024, only 6 percent of those who approved of Biden described the IC as a threat to civil liberties, while 15 percent of Biden’s detractors expressed this fear.

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With a second Trump administration taking office in early 2025, data from our next survey (conducted in Summer 2025) should provide some visibility into the pattern of increasing partisan influence on public views of the U.S. IC. With new leaders atop the IC and other broader changes in intelligence budgets and foreign policy priorities, public perceptions of the IC and its contributions to U.S. security will be an important measure of the agencies’ impact and continued relevance.