Why congress is becoming less productive

The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.

When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.

The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.

Experts point to several reasons for this. One key factor is an increase in polarization — Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically than they’ve been in the last 50 years, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. That’s led to a decrease in bipartisanship, a necessary ingredient for bills to pass in a governing body full of checks and balances.

Fewer bills getting through to the president’s desk means the small number of mandatory ones that Congress must pass — such as government funding or annual legislation authorizing defense policies — are getting longer, said Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, as lawmakers try to jam the bills with policies that wouldn’t otherwise get a vote.

“Those large packages have come to bear more of Congress’s legislating,” she said. A longer bill takes more time to read, debate and get voted on, slowing down the process further.

With more policies being shoved into bills increasing in length, the use of policies known as “poison pills” is another hurdle — partisan policies that will be completely unacceptable to the other party. Case in point: Republicans attempting to ban mail delivery of abortion pills via a crucial agriculture funding bill that must be reauthorized every five years.

The length of bills “represents an increasing dysfunction in the institution,” Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said. “Congress has difficulty taking action on a lot of individual pieces because of the politics or because of time constraints, and it’s easier to package some of these things up into ‘must pass’ bills… And then it’s a question of, ‘What can we add to this before it becomes so top heavy that it topples over?’”

The spikes in the number of bills passed correlate with periods when one party controlled all levers of government — House, Senate and the White House. But even when one party controls the majority, “unified party control is not doing as much work as it used to,” Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University, said. “The minority party has become especially increasingly aggressive in using the rules of the game, particularly in the Senate, in blocking measures from even going to the floor.” That can be seen in the number of measures passed by each chamber of Congress, which is falling too.

Another more elusive factor in Congress’s decreasing productivity is that members are spending less time talking to each other. A typical senator’s schedule includes flying back to Washington, D.C., on Monday for votes in the evening, then flying back to their home state on Thursday evening. The “Senate Friday” effect is commonly cited among reporters and staffers on the Hill – a sudden surge in activity on Thursday afternoons, as senators rush to finish any votes so they can go home for the weekend.

The House more often has votes Friday morning, but there is still an expectation of going back to the district for a longer weekend, plus recesses when lawmakers are home for weeks at a time. That Monday to Thursday schedule leaves just two full days for a laundry list of work.

It is not clear how these hurdles to productivity will be solved. Part of the problem is that the current Republican Party holds a tiny majority in the House of just five seats, giving disproportionate power to any small group of members who wish to exert their influence, as seen by the far right House Freedom Caucus repeatedly blocking legislation it disagrees with, even though it was put forward by their own party, much to the frustration of their colleagues.

“We’ve had divided government in earlier periods and haven’t seen this level of low legislative productivity,” Craig Volden, director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia, said. “The question is, what is the Republican Party going to sort itself into, in terms of its main priorities, and what is the best strategy they see as advancing those priorities?”

Timmons acknowledged facing this issue himself.

“I have somebody running against me (in the primary election) that agrees with all the votes that I make, he just doesn’t agree that I don’t scream and yell,” he told Reuters. “Next Congress we’re going to have to figure out how to relearn the muscle memory of voting as one… If we have a narrow majority and we can’t do anything, that’s not good.”

Kilmer is part of a wave of lawmakers retiring Congress – 45 at time of publication, not the highest number on record but enough to draw attention. But he remains optimistic about Congress’s ability to change.

“I don't think it's a secret that Congress is a fixer upper,” he said.