Note the wording of the question, which stresses attitudes toward “the people running these institutions.” It doesn’t ask whether you think science has changed. It’s specifically asking about the folks wearing literal and figurative lab coats who are running joints like the National Science Foundation, testifying before Congress, and appearing on The Tonight Show while forecasting famine up the ying-yang and praising coercive population control measures, and often being totally wrong about everything.

If it’s “educated conservatives” who have lost faith in scientists, a fully plausible explanation is simply that they recognize what libertarians and crypto-libertarians ranging from Thomas Szasz to Michel Foucault have been pointing out since the early 1960s in works starting with The Myth of Mental Illness and The Birth of the Clinic: That much if not all of what passes for dispassionate scientific discourse is hugely implicated in power struggles that have little or nothing to do with disinterested, true-for-all-times-and-all-places Truths with capital Ts.