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The 118th Congress (2023-2024) of the United States will go down as one of the least productive in history. Barring a miracle, it will be the least productive in the modern era, according to Congress.gov, which has a record of legislative production going back to the 82nd Congress (1951-1952).
At this session’s halfway point, Congress passed a paltry 34 bills, the lowest amount in the first year of a session since the Great Depression. They picked up the pace in the second half and currently have 88 bills passed and signed into law.
For perspective, a typical Congress passes several hundred bills per session. Even the 117th Congress passed 365 bills during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its trajectory, there’s no chance this Congress will come close to that. “Not up to par” doesn’t quite describe the 118th Congress. It's more like “played 18 with a croquet mallet, a bowling ball, and a bottle of Tequila.”
Moreover, the next Congress will likely fail just as miserably. The chamber is as divided as ever, with razor-thin margins, and there is no indication that this will change come this November. So what’s the problem? When Congress fails to do its job, regulators – or as some might call them, “unelected bureaucrats” – step in to do the job.
As Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) told Punchbowl News, “We’ve been enduring the least productive Congress in my lifetime, and possibly in history. I remember from history class Harry Truman going on his whistle stop tour and complaining about the ‘Do Nothing Congress.’ We are in the ‘Do Nothing Congress,’ not on steroids but on sleeping pills.”
And then there is the constant threat of government shutdowns. Passing bills is one thing, but passing funding bills, called appropriations, is another. Passing regular appropriations to fund the budget is the most basic, core function of the job. The Constitution is clear: The federal government can’t spend what hasn’t been approved by Congress.
Yet Congress can’t even do that. They are so bad at it, in fact, that they don’t even attempt to pass a full budget; instead, they fight until the last minute over temporary spending patches called “continuing resolutions.”
Things are so bad that Congress has failed to pass any regular appropriations bills since FY2019. Since FY2011, Congress enacted only six of the 156 regular appropriations bills that could have been passed. In other words, they’re batting a miserable 0.038, which is worse than the worst Major League Baseball player of all time, John Gochnaur, who averaged 0.187 over his career from 1901 to 1903.
The dysfunction makes you wonder. It’s like going to a concert. Having good concessions, a cool t-shirt, and killer seats is nice, but if the band refuses to play their instruments, you’d wonder why they bothered to show up at all.
The obvious question to ask is, why? Why does this keep happening? It wasn’t always like this, so why now? The answer can be found in the appropriations process. The struggle to fund the budget and avert shutdowns is emblematic of the larger issue of hyper-partisanship and political grandstanding.
Members of Congress learned that they gain more from performing political theater than from getting anything done. Why else would Members routinely expend political capital on bills with zero chance of passing?
The latest example from the appropriations process is the dead-on-arrival Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Republicans, mainly in the House, demanded the inclusion of the SAVE Act to pass the latest short-term funding bill, knowing they didn’t have the numbers to demand such a thing and knowing the funding would pass anyway. As expected, the Senate passed the continuing resolution with just days to spare. Another temporary stopgap measure to paper over the dysfunctional partisanship of the chamber.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Our research at the Independent Center confirms that voters yearn for bipartisanship and solutions. We find time and time again that between two-thirds and three-quarters of respondents favorably view politicians who work both sides of the aisle. After all, it takes both sides to reach a consensus and pass anything in Washington.
Further, voters are tired of the tribalism of Republicans and Democrats, and most want a way out. We find that just over half of survey respondents prefer more options. 56 percent want to choose more options than Republicans and Democrats, and the same number want more independent and third-party candidates to represent them in Congress. Put differently, just over a quarter of our respondents are happy choosing from and being represented by two parties. Pew research conducted in 2022 found the same.
It's excellent news that voters cite partisanship as the problem and eagerly welcome more options. It means we have a viable path out of this mess. Voters are sick of the Hatfield and McCoys-style blood feud that has ossified Congress into an eternal cycle of showmanship and stalemate.
