Center on Representative Government

As the budget process on Capitol Hill moves forward, with its heated debates over steep cuts to Medicaid, raising the debt ceiling, and countless other decisions, you could be mistaken for thinking that Congress is at the center of the action in Washington these days. Sadly, it’s not.

Don’t get me wrong. Cutting $715 billion from health care spending, mostly Medicaid, would be a momentous step jeopardizing the health care of millions of Americans. So would enacting big boosts to the military and to immigration enforcement efforts and extending tax cuts for mostly wealthy taxpayers while cutting not just the Medicaid rolls, but food assistance and clean energy funding. Whatever emerges from the budget fracas on Capitol Hill—which is as much between Republican factions as it is between Republicans and Democrats—will put a congressional stamp on President Trump’s plans.

Yet the big story, both in the country at large and in Washington, is what Congress is not doing. More than anything else, it’s not standing up for its place as a co-equal branch of government. The fact that the key House committee through which the budget bill had to pass met at 1 a.m. to do its work, when pretty much no one but a hardy group of reporters was watching, is aptly symbolic. The current leaders of the governing institution that’s supposed to represent the voices of the American people prefer not to be front and center.

This is not how it’s supposed to be—indeed, it’s not how things have been within relatively recent memory. As the political scientist Yuval Levin put it recently in The Atlantic, “A weak Congress is not the norm in the American system, and a Congress this weak would surely have surprised the authors of the Constitution.”

Though this is an issue for this moment, it’s been a long time coming. As Levin points out, efforts over the last quarter century to make Congress more effective by concentrating power in leaders’ hands have had the opposite effect: “Many ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news,” he writes, at the same time that narrow majorities have put a premium on party loyalty and discouraged “the cross-partisan bargaining that is the essence of legislative work.” The result is a weaker Congress—one whose members appear to care more about partisanship and supporting their own party than the power of their own institution.

At the same time, presidents since well before Donald Trump have been eager to expand their power. Or as former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who served under George W. Bush, put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies.” These range from the use of emergency powers to executive orders to firing statutorily protected officials and intruding far onto Congress’s constitutional turf when it comes to taxes, spending, war powers, and, right now, tariffs.

Yet acknowledging that Congress’s supine attitude today has roots in the past (I’m talking about the institution as a whole, not necessarily individual members) doesn’t override the importance right now of asking, Where’s Congress? It has the constitutional power to call into question (or vote to approve) DOGE’s extensive cuts to federal agencies whose staff—from the National Weather Service to the CDC to the FAA—help protect Americans’ lives; it has the right to challenge President Trump’s tariff regime; it could resist the administration’s attempts to cancel spending decisions that Congress itself has made.

But to use an overworked and somewhat corny phrase, it has to want to change. I would go even further and argue that it needs to change—not because of particular policy or partisan calculations, but because the system of representative government that made America a great nation depends on the balance between presidential, congressional, and judicial power. When it gets out of whack, as it’s done, it doesn’t just stop working well; the entire system is undermined.