‘Wildly dysfunctional’: Congress is in a historically bad place, and it’s actually worse than you think

Part of the reason may be that it’s not clear if lawmakers can legitimately claim to be even doing their jobs.

Congress has sunk to similarly historic levels of nonproductivity, partisan fighting, and general dysfunction. It’s true in the statistics, it’s true in the clear repudiation of Congress being delivered by voters, and it’s true in the general malaise that current and former members of the institution express. But even if voters were to send many of them packing, it’s not clear that would meaningfully improve the situation.

Congress has been locked in a sort of death spiral. Compounding effects of increased partisanship, decreased efficacy, and general malcontent fuel a self-perpetuating cycle in which the body becomes even less productive and uses less of its authority, and the public is rendered less impressed.

Although dysfunction and congressional unpopularity have long been something of a truism, the situation is more extreme than anything in recent norms. Not only has Congress slumped to its lowest measurable output in decades, but the body’s overall decline has come in conjunction with a president who has reveled in demolishing precedents and with an electorate seemingly more infuriated with its representatives than ever before. As it all adds up to a political crisis point, the Globe is documenting how far politics has deviated from any semblance of normalcy.

It’s unclear if Congress has hit rock bottom, but many members interviewed for this story agreed that it feels like the body is at least approaching it. The consequences are a further solidification of political power in the White House and the courts, and a public left wondering what happened to the body supposed to represent their interests on the national stage.

Former Maryland representative Donna Edwards, a Democrat who is serving this year as the president of the bipartisan Former Members of Congress Association, compared it to the classic balancing game Jenga.

“I look at these things as like stones, or like Jenga, where you pull a piece out and you see how much of it can stand, and you pull another piece out, and pretty soon it all crashes,” Edwards said. “That’s where we are.”

In 2024, about a year into his tenure as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson described his job in a book interview as about half being the speaker of the House and half “mental health counselor.” In a podcast interview a year later, after President Trump took office, he dropped the speakership duties entirely and added “firefighter” to his counseling role.

By this summer, the situation had escalated: In a newspaper interview, Johnson compared his role to being a “triage surgeon in an active battlefield,” going from “crisis to crisis, hemorrhaging wounds, all day long.”

At its most fundamental level, Congress’s job is to pass laws. It is doing less of that these days, according to congressional data. In 2025, only 69 bills were enacted into law, and in 2023, only 63, making them the two least productive sessions of Congress in the last 25 years.

Congress tends to pass more laws in election years, but has also been lagging behind its typical pace. By the end of June, it had passed 32 laws.

The last time Congress actually passed government funding bills before the end of the fiscal year was 1997, and in recent years, shutdowns (which occur when Congress fails to pass any funding before the deadline) have become common. There have been six full or partial shutdowns since 2013, and three in Trump’s term alone.

The problem isn’t a lack of ideas. In fact, the number of bills being introduced has actually increased significantly in the past few years, meaning Congress is passing a smaller and smaller percent of what its members have proposed.

Part of the explanation is that Congress is increasingly legislating through the use of mega-bills, in which members roll their individual proposals into a massive catch-all measure, using the the few laws that Congress has to pass every year. Lawmakers are also making use of a procedural tactic to pass mega-bills on strict party lines, bypassing the Senate filibuster.

But even those tactics are not keeping pace with historic levels of productivity, according to a Gov Track analysis that factors how many bills are included in larger packages. And as a result, the process of writing laws is increasingly held in the hands of the few party leaders in Congress and less in committees, giving members less of a role in shaping legislation.

“Compared to when I got here 16 years ago, it is wildly dysfunctional,” said Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat. “We are not taking up and passing bills. We are not having committee markups. We are not putting amendments on the floor… . I mean, it’s really disheartening how much harder it’s gotten to get good things done.”

What lawmakers are doing more of these days is fighting to keep their seats. As elections grow ever more expensive and the media environment ever more fractured, an increasing amount of lawmakers’ time seems to be spent fund-raising and engaging or posting on social media.

“There are a growing number of my colleagues who don’t think enacting legislation is their job,” Coons said. “They think getting clicks and Twitter followers and YouTube channel subscribers is their job. That’s not my job… . If you elect people because you want them to fight, rather than legislate, don’t be surprised that we aren’t legislating.”

And then there’s Trump. Emboldened in his return to the White House, he has essentially bent the GOP-led body to his will this term, dictating the agenda, brazenly testing the bounds of his powers by claiming authority traditionally conferred to Congress, and personally punishing any Republicans who stand up to him.

Though Congress constitutionally is in charge of funding the government, Trump has waged an all-out campaign to assert more discretion over how the money gets spent – or not spent at all. Under the “Department of Government Efficiency” in the early days of his second term, the White House essentially dismantled and shuttered a congressionally created federal agency, USAID, and Trump has dismissed numerous congressionally appointed members of various federal boards. The Supreme Court has blessed Trump’s firings, with some exceptions, but has not directly ruled on USAID’s dismantling.

Trump has further side-stepped powers designated to Congress by the Constitution on tariffs and waging war. In almost every case, Republicans in Congress have either deferred to Trump or merely gotten rolled despite their grumbling objections.

Longtime Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has been one of the few in her party to object at times, and she does not believe Congress is functioning well.

“I’ve been around here for two decades plus, and I’ve seen different leaders and different presidents and administrations,” said Murkowski, a moderate who crosses the aisle more than most. “So I know that there are highs and lows, and ebbs and flows, and we get that. What I think we’re seeing that I worry about is more and more of a ceding of our congressional authorities to the executive branch, or just deferring to the courts.”

Her colleague Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats and is also known to cross party lines, was more pointed.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said King, who was also a congressional staffer in the 1970s. “There are lots of examples of presidents grabbing more power, but nothing like this. What’s happened in the last year and a half is really not normal in the sense of American history.”

Exacerbating the problem is a sharp increase in partisanship across the political spectrum, which has manifested in Congress as a gulf between the parties. Congressional majorities have been shrinking, but rather than fostering more bipartisanship, it’s only locked the two sides deeper in dispute. Districts have become redder or bluer, so that an increasing number of congressional races are decided in primaries, where candidates appeal to their most activist party base.

According to a Cook Political Report analysis of the presidential vote in each congressional district, the number of truly competitive House seats — identified as seats that are within a 5 point lean in either direction — has plummeted over the past 30 years from cycles of redistricting. After Supreme Court decisions effectively greenlit partisan gerrymandering, the arms race culminated this year in partisan mid-decade map-drawing by both parties. After this year’s round of changes, only 69 districts out of 435 in the House, or roughly 16 percent, are truly swing seats. That’s down from more than 160 seats in 1999.

Partisanship has increasingly factored into Congress’s work in measurable ways. The number of times the Senate has had to reach 60 votes to advance legislation (a.k.a. “the filibuster”) has skyrocketed in the last 25 years, eating up a greater share of their dwindling work week. The number of senators from the party opposite the president who vote for Cabinet officials has also dropped significantly — and unanimous voice votes that were common even in former president Barack Obama’s first term have disappeared entirely.

“Just after the 2016 election, I was told by somebody in leadership … not to cosponsor a bill with a Democrat because there was nothing more irrelevant in Congress than a Democrat,” said former Florida Republican representative Dennis Ross, the incoming president of the Former Members of Congress Association. Then when the House flipped to Democratic control in 2018, “there was nothing more irrelevant in Congress than a Republican.”

Ironically, some of the changes over the years that seem to respond to voters’ desires, such as maintaining ties to the local community, democratization of fund-raising without party power brokers, fewer taxpayer-funded trips, and media-savvy politicians, have similarly contributed to the decline of the institution, long-timers say. Lawmakers spend less time in Washington and generally have fewer opportunities to build relationships, especially across the aisle.

Small-dollar fund-raising and social media outreach mean lawmakers can actually benefit when they publicly buck their leadership, offering an incentive to go rogue.

And as voters grow weary of what they perceive as a do-nothing Congress, they increasingly opt to send bomb-throwers to Washington or tune out entirely.

“There are those kinds of intangible things, what people might call soft things, that actually contribute to the hard work of being in Congress,” Edwards said. “if you’re a rank-and-file member and you have nothing better to do all day long — because you don’t, because your committees aren’t really doing anything — you make mischief.“

That mischief is now in full swing.

Most Americans by now have probably seen headlines about chaos on the House floor. Multiple times this Congress, leadership has sent lawmakers home days or weeks earlier than intended, because they can’t even muster the votes to pass basic procedural measures.

It’s become almost commonplace for House votes to stretch on and on as Johnson and his deputies cajole, berate, and negotiate with holdouts in plain view of reporters, shuttling between animated conversations on the floor and contentious meetings in nearby offices. Two such episodes set records for being the longest votes ever within weeks of each other in July 2025. It’s an inside joke in Washington that dysfunction is peaking when the dreaded “???” pops on the schedule for that day’s voting.

It’s led to an embarrassing spate of failed attempts to pass a basic procedural measure known as a rule, a failure unheard of for two decades, and rare before that, before becoming a regular occurrence in the past three years. While the situation is most pronounced in the House, the Senate’s own contingent of rogues has grown and the two chambers are increasingly at odds with each other.

Leadership has few, if any, options to curtail the mischief. Often, the only person in Washington who can really move lawmakers is Trump, and he has been known to call holdouts at any hour to do so (sometimes, to leadership’s dismay, to encourage their rabble rousing).

“When I first got elected, you were going to be taken off your committee, you’re going to be stripped of your earmarks, kicked out of the conference” if you defied leadership, said Texas Republican Representative Michael McCaul, who is retiring this year. “There were a lot of tools available. Less so under [former speaker John] Boehner, and then the more he would punish, the more they would just go on late-night entertainment TV and hit him, and then it spiraled out of control. And so it’s very difficult to govern in that kind of scenario where you have free agents that run around.”

Some of the mischief-makers, so to speak, see their work as spirited advocacy, the only way for a less-senior lawmaker to have impact or, counterintuitively, to restore bipartisanship.

The most prominent example may be the law Congress passed to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, which began as a rebellious push by a handful of Republicans joining up with Democrats to use procedural tactics to force a vote. Once it came to the floor, the bill sailed through with just a single lawmaker voting no.

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna has been involved in several similar procedural efforts to champion her priorities over her leadership’s objections, though she did not sign the measure to force the Epstein files vote. Some have earned her plaudits and some have generated criticism, but she says she’s merely using the powers of Congress — as they are today — to their fullest to advance her priorities.

“Most members don’t know the rules, and so … ‘regular order’ to them means that you don’t know how to do your job and you lean on leadership,” Luna said. “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.”

Sophie Endrud of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.