In this paper, we shall discuss the meaning and the relevance of trust for e-government. First, we shall identify trust concepts from philosophy, which might be important for trust engineering in e-government. Then we shall look at trust models for e-commerce, and we shall discuss how they may be transferred to e-government. Afterwards, we shall present the results of two empirical studies among young people. The theoretical and the empirical results will be used to derive recommendations for trust engineering in practice. Finally, we shall have a second look at philosophy, discussing the implications of postmodern reality for the design requirements for e-government solutions, and we shall derive a research agenda based on recent results in applied cryptography.