WASHINGTON (AP) — For many Americans, the Republican dysfunction that has ground business in the U.S. House to a halt as two wars rage abroad and a budget crisis looms at home is feeding into a longer-term pessimism about the country’s core institutions.

The lack of faith extends beyond Congress, with recent polling conducted both before and after the leadership meltdown finding a mistrust in everything from the courts to organized religion. The GOP internal bickering that for nearly three weeks has left open the speaker’s position — second in line to the presidency — is widely seen as the latest indication of deep problems with the nation’s bedrock institutions.

“They’re holding up the people’s business because they’re so dysfunctional,” said Christopher Lauff, 57, of Fargo, North Dakota.

Part of that business, he said, is approving money for Ukraine to continue its fight against Russia’s invasion, something he says ultimately helps the U.S. — a point President Joe Biden stressed Thursday during an Oval Office address.

“We’re usually the knight in shining armor, but we can’t be that now,” said Lauff, a Democrat.

The disdain for Congress is just one area where Americans say they are losing faith. Various polls say the negative feelings include a loss of confidence or interest in institutions such as organized religion, policing, the Supreme Court, even banking.

“Trust in institutions has deteriorated substantially,” said Kay Schlozman, professor of political science at Boston College. Schlozman said she believes in government and the things it provides, such as national defense and access to health care, but “I also can very much understand why the American people can be cynical about government.”

The turmoil in the House and the federal case against Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who is facing charges for bribery, show that both major parties are contributing to the dour outlook.

The House has been without a permanent leader since early October after a small cadre of right-wing Republicans pushed out a member of their own party, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Subsequent attempts to replace him have failed.

“That is an example of exactly the kind of thing that I would say can’t foster trust of government among the American people — the multiple votes, the fractiousness within parties, of people being personally ambitious and not being willing to compromise” Schlozman said.

About half of adults (53%) say they have “hardly any confidence at all” in the people running Congress, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that was conducted in October. That’s in line with 49% who said that in March. Just 3% have a great deal of confidence in Congress, virtually unchanged from March.

About 4 in 10 adults (39%) have hardly any confidence in the executive branch of the federal government, compared with 44% in March. Most Republicans (56%) have low levels of confidence in the executive branch — which is overseen by a member of the opposing party, Democrat Joe Biden — compared with just 20% of Democrats.

About a third of adults (36%) say they have hardly any confidence in the conservative-majority Supreme Court, a figure that has remained steady in recent months. The polling reinforces that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say their confidence in the Supreme Court is low. Black Americans are more likely than Americans overall, as well as more likely than white or Hispanic adults, to have hardly any confidence in the nation’s highest court.

One-third of U.S. adults (33%) continue to have low levels of confidence in the Justice Department, with Republicans having less confidence than Democrats. This comes as former President Donald Trump rails against the department after being charged with mishandling classified documents and attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Rick Cartelli, 63, a health care worker in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, who identifies as an independent, said he is happy with his local and state government but the current environment, especially the chaos on Capitol Hill, has wiped out what little confidence he had in that institution.

“What is happening now is not good for the country at all,” he said.

Cartelli also said he has little confidence in the executive branch, citing what he says are “mental lapses” by Biden that “are only probably going to become more and more pronounced.”

Multiple AP-NORC polls from earlier this year find that the dearth of confidence is pervasive, spreading to organized religion, the government’s intelligence gathering and diplomatic agencies, as well as financial institutions. Slightly fewer than half (45%) in a study from AP-NORC and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights said they have little or no confidence that the news media is reporting news fully, accurately and fairly.

Views on the military were best, with just 17% saying they have hardly any confidence in it.

Kathleen Kersey, a 32-year-old health care worker in Brunswick, Georgia, who is a Republican, said she has little confidence in any of the federal entities, including Congress, but has more for the institutions closer to home. She also is a fan of Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who she said is a moral man.

“There’s only so much one person can do, and just with all the evil, it’s hard to have confidence in anything really, even the churches because everything works together as one,” she said.

Confidence in the country’s foundational institutions has ebbed and flowed historically, though there’s been a long-term downward trend since at least the 1970s. Trust in government waned in the era of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers before making a slight recovery during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s — despite Reagan’s famous declaration that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

David Bateman, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, said the tea party movement during former President Barack Obama’s term was the beginning of a steadier decline in confidence, as noted in polling from Gallup. But Bateman believes the most acute problem in recent years has been Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, despite dozens of courts rejecting his claims and multiple audits and reviews in the swing states where he disputed his loss.

“The biggest threat to trust in institutions was the Trump campaign’s refusal to concede the election and insistence that they had won,” along with a large segment of the Republicans in Congress going along with the claim in the certification process, Bateman said.

“That validated the idea that the whole institutional system is rigged, which it isn’t,” he said.

He said an example of the fallout is the Republican attack on the Justice Department, including the FBI. The “weaponization” of the FBI has been a battle cry for Republicans who maintain it has targeted conservatives and who are incensed at the various investigations of Trump. Candidates vying against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination have said they would fire FBI Director Chris Wray.

Distrust of the FBI had long been the purview of Democrats, especially those aware of civil rights-era monitoring.

“If you told me in 2000 that Republicans are going to be saying you can’t trust the FBI, I would have been shocked,” Bateman said. “Going after the FBI has been a real ratcheting up of distrust.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of flights across the U.S. were canceled or delayed Wednesday after a system that offers safety information to pilots failed, and the government launched an investigation into the breakdown, which grounded some planes for hours.

The Federal Aviation Administration said preliminary indications “traced the outage to a damaged database file.” The agency said it would take steps to avoid another similar disruption.

The breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions.

Before a plane takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include details about bad weather, runway closures or other temporary factors that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based but moved online years ago.

The system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until midmorning Wednesday. The FAA took the rare step of preventing any planes from taking off for a time, and the cascading chaos led to more than 1,300 flight cancellations and 9,000 delays by early evening on the East Coast, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told a news conference that the problems “led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system.”

After the failures were fixed, he warned that travelers could continue to see some effects “rippling through the system.”

Buttigieg said his agency would now try to learn why the system went down.

Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology failure. Some compared it in scope to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.

Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system.

Many of those systems “are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” he said.

John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said the aviation industry has talked for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.

“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”

According to FAA advisories, the NOTAM system failed at 8:28 p.m. Tuesday, preventing new or amended notices from being distributed to pilots. The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as air traffic picked up in the morning, the phone system was overwhelmed.

The FAA ordered all departing flights grounded early Wednesday, affecting all passenger and cargo flights. Some medical flights could get clearance, and the outage did not affect military operations.

President Joe Biden said that he was briefed by Buttigieg.

Buttigieg said the ground stop showed that “safety is going to be our North Star, as it always is.”

“We are now pivoting to focus on understanding the causes of the issue,” he said.

Pilots and safety officials have complained about NOTAMs for years, saying there are too many of them and that some are unnecessary and written in cryptic abbreviations.

The National Transportation Safety Board highlighted the large number of notices in its investigation of a near-disaster in 2017 in San Francisco. An Air Canada jet whose pilots had overlooked a NOTAM about a closed runway nearly landed by mistake on a parallel taxiway. They skimmed just over the tops of four other airliners waiting to take off.

The safety board’s chairman at the time, Robert Sumwalt, noted that the closed runway was mentioned on the eighth of 27 pages of notices for the San Francisco airport, and the entry was written in an arcane fashion.

“That’s what NOTAMs are. They are a bunch of garbage that no one pays any attention to,” he said.

The FAA said in a 2020 report that it modernized the distribution of the notices through a standardized digital format that was to be completed in July of that year.

As the extent of Wednesday’s breakdown became clear and airlines delayed more flights, passengers scrambled to rearrange trips. Many said they had trouble finding out how long the delays would last.

“There is just a lot of frustration, a lot of confusion,” said Ryan Ososki, who was trying to fly from Washington, D.C., to California for a conference.

Julia Macpherson was on a United flight from Sydney to Los Angeles when she learned of possible delays.

“As I was up in the air, I got news from my friend who was also traveling overseas that there was a power outage,” said Macpherson, who was returning to Jacksonville, Florida, from Tasmania.

Passengers at airports in Chicago, Atlanta and elsewhere reported similar experiences.

European flights into the U.S. appeared to be largely unaffected.

It was the latest headache for travelers in the U.S., who faced an even larger number of daily flight cancellations over the Christmas holiday due to a severe winter storm and a breakdown in crew-scheduling technology at Southwest Airlines.

___

Koenig reported from Dallas. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Tara Copp in Washington, Kelvin Chan in London, Tom Krisher in Detroit and Freida Frisaro in Miami contributed to this report.

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