Federal agency X accounts are getting far more engagement in the second Trump term than under Biden – Pew Research Center
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Federal agencies are getting far more audience engagement on X (formerly Twitter) in the second Trump administration than they did during the final year of the Biden administration, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. The study comes amid coverage of the content some agencies are sharing on social media and their broader messaging strategies.
All but two of the 24 executive agency X accounts with available year-over-year data received more likes and reposts, on average, in the first year of the Trump administration than in the final year of the Biden administration. Posts from some agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor, routinely get thousands of likes after receiving minimal X engagement in the past.
Most of the accounts we analyzed post about as often or somewhat less frequently than they did in the final year of the Biden administration. But a handful are posting much more. The White House, DHS, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement accounts now post more than twice as often as they did during the Biden administration.
This Pew Research Center analysis compares how federal agencies used X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) in the first year of the second Trump administration and the last year of the Biden administration. It examines how often these accounts posted, how much engagement they received and how the language in their posts changed.
Pew Research Center does research to help the public, the media and decision-makers understand important topics. This research is part of our longstanding work on how the U.S. public, as well as lawmakers and other public figures, use social media.
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This analysis includes 30 X accounts in total: 27 operated by the current administration’s Cabinet-level agencies and a selection of subagencies, plus accounts operated by the Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE), the White House (@WhiteHouse) and the official White House “rapid response” team (@RapidResponse47).
For each of these accounts, we attempted to collect posts from the last year of the Biden administration (Jan. 20, 2024-Jan. 19, 2025) and the first year of the second Trump administration (Jan. 20, 2025-Jan. 20, 2026). We used a third-party web scraping service to collect available post text, likes and reposts for each account, accessed Feb. 11-18, 2026.
Year-over-year comparisons are available for 24 of the 30 accounts. The @DOGE and @RapidResponse47 accounts did not exist prior to the second Trump administration, and Biden-era posts were unavailable for four additional accounts: those belonging to Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Defense/Department of War, the Justice Department and the U.S. Trade Representative.
We collected State Department post data shortly before it removed posts made during previous administrations.
The language that federal agencies use on X has also changed since the Biden administration, reflecting a shift in messaging under President Donald Trump. For instance, posts across the accounts we studied now contain the words “American” and “president” more than twice as often as they did during the last year of the Biden administration.
The differences in language are especially notable for some agencies. For example, there has been a fivefold increase in the share of Immigration and Customs Enforcement posts that mention the word “criminal.” And terms like “AI,” “dominance” and “coal” are now mentioned in around one-in-ten posts from the Department of Energy after appearing rarely, if ever, in Biden-era posts.
The State Department recently announced that it would delete its X posts from before January 2025 and archive them internally, rather than keeping them public. (We collected data from this account before those posts were removed.)
Pre-January 2025 posts have also been removed from the accounts operated by Customs and Border Protection (@CBP), the Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept), the U.S. Trade Representative (@USTradeRep) and the Department of Defense – which is also known by its secondary title, the Department of War (@DeptofWar). The department retains the DOD account despite changing its handle in 2025.
Two of these accounts – @StateDept and @DeptofWar – are among the top three government accounts on X by number of followers.
Despite only existing since early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, stands out for its presence and visibility on X. With 4.8 million followers as of February 2026, it is the fifth-most followed government account we examined.
The DOGE account also received far more engagement on the platform in the Trump administration’s first year than any other account we analyzed. The typical @DOGE post on X received almost 29,000 likes and reposts – more than three times the engagement received by the average post from @WhiteHouse, the second-most engaged-with account. Much like the agency itself, however, the DOGE account has become inactive in recent months.
Another new account with a notable presence on X is @RapidResponse47, an affiliate of the official White House account created in January 2025 to support the Trump agenda. It is by far the most active of the accounts we examined, with an average of almost 40 posts per day. The typical post from this account received about 3,400 likes and reposts, making it the third-most engaged-with account of the second Trump administration.
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Anna Lieb is a computational social science assistant at Pew Research Center.
Aaron Smith is director of Data Labs at Pew Research Center.
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