I've often given thought to exactly this problem: trust in
all American institutions has been and continues to decline precipitously. I can not name a single case of trust increasing anywhere within the last decade - religion and the church (catholic/Catholic/et al), government at all levels (SF on up to NASA), academia and the sciences and seemingly all forms of education from elementary school on up to University, unions, the medical establishment from local providers to the CDC/FDA/NIH, the US military, the police (although somehow, we went from the Democratic party regarding the FBI as Hoover's institute to one safeguarding Democracy), Facebook (Big Tech Everyman) went from a beacon of Democracy under the election of Obama to whatever it is considered now, corporations and Capitalism, the courts and even the founding of the country itself. For a more niche subject of personal interest, our furniture has seemingly purposefully declined in quality as we outsourced manufacturing to China via IKEA and forced everyone else to do so.
I'd guess that the polarization of our society is self reinforcing, and that as it increases, our institutions follow along for one reason or another whether it be some form of "good business" or internal capture. Its probably some Internet Law that any institution not specifically devoted to staying out of it will eventually succumb, but even then you have the ACLU... and there is non-culture war decline in trust - something more like the financialization of everything or the injection of metrics into all parts of life that can be metered....
We don't value competence and accountability first; maybe this was always the case and only our narrative changed, but that's hard to imagine when we used to do things. At this point, why not Research, too?