Diagnosing Congressional Dysfunction

(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Law & Liberty on September 21, 2026.)

Americans are frustrated by politics. According to Gallup’s latest survey, just one in four are satisfied with the way things are going in the nation. Their dissatisfaction has stayed around 80 percent for most of this year, making the current mood among the most pessimistic Gallup has ever recorded.

They are especially frustrated by Congress. Only 10 percent of Americans approved of the way Congress was doing its job in Gallup’s April survey. Eighty-six percent disapproved, tying the highest disapproval Gallup has ever recorded for the institution.

Their frustration is understandable, especially given that they have witnessed extraordinary progress elsewhere in their lives. Americans’ dissatisfaction with Congress has deepened significantly since 2007—the year in which the iPhone made its debut. During the same period the pace of scientific discovery, technological advancement, and medical innovation has been remarkable. Scientists have photographed a black hole. Researchers have built artificial intelligence programs capable of doing things we once thought required human intelligence. And doctors have developed cancer treatments that harness a person’s immune system to attack tumors with increasing precision. Progress appears to be accelerating everywhere except in the House and Senate.

Against that backdrop, Congress’s recurring inability to perform comparatively ordinary tasks is striking. Progressives elect lawmakers who support Medicare for All and wonder why Congress can’t enact it. Conservatives watch Republican majorities struggle to advance priorities like the SAVE America Act. Americans in the middle watch Congress repeatedly struggle to fund the government on time. The contrast invites an understandable question: if institutions elsewhere in American life can overcome seemingly impossible problems, why does legislating remain so difficult for the House and Senate?

Reformers respond to this frustration by treating Congress like a technical problem. They search for the political equivalent of a better operating system—the procedural rule, institutional arrangement, or electoral reform that will finally make lawmakers behave correctly. The result is a proliferation of sophisticated proposals: biennial budgeting, automatic continuing resolutions, fiscal commissions, redesigned committee structures, new floor procedures, larger congressional staffs, and reforms intended to help Congress reclaim policymaking authority from administrative agencies and the courts.

To be fair, these proposed reforms are designed to solve different problems. But they share the same underlying assumption that Congress’s persistent dysfunction is a technical problem susceptible to a technical solution.

That assumption gets the problem backward. We can’t fix Congress by applying expertise to engineer outcomes because politics is not the source of its dysfunction. The effort to insulate Congress from politics is. What ails Congress isn’t too much politics. It is a way of thinking about politics that makes it unnecessary.

The Scientification of Politics

Lawmakers and their constituents are creatures of their age. And the current age is dominated by science. Scientific thinking therefore influences how Americans understand the natural world and what they expect knowledge and decision-making to look like in the political world.

Science seeks increasingly exact knowledge about natural phenomena. Scientists make assertions and then test them against observable evidence to verify or falsify them. Mistaken assertions are discarded. Successful ones become the basis for further inquiry. And knowledge accumulates over time.

This method works extraordinarily well when the object is the natural world. The problem arises when Americans expect politics to work the same way.

The scientification of politics does not mean that politicians suddenly became certain of themselves or that lawmakers should ignore expertise. It describes the tendency to treat political disagreements as if they were technical questions with objectively correct answers that can be discovered independently of the political process.

That tendency is evident in the way political arguments are framed today. Lawmakers do not merely argue that they prefer their policies to their opponents’ policies. They often invoke authoritative studies, empirical models, and expert consensus to argue that their preferred policies are demonstrably correct.

Expert analysis itself is not the problem. Lawmakers have used—and will continue to use—evidence to support their policy arguments. And they routinely rely on the expertise of institutions like the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office to inform their deliberations. The problem arises when evidence is treated as capable of resolving the political judgment that remains after the factual questions have been considered.

Legislative deliberation becomes a liability when that distinction disappears. If one side in a debate understands itself as possessing the objectively correct answer, there is little reason to engage, much less bargain, with opponents other than to compel their acquiescence. When the correct answer is already known, compromise looks like error and delay appears irresponsible. Conflict ceases to be the medium through which a free people governs itself and becomes instead a pathology to be cured.

Moreover, this is not simply polarization. Polarization describes the distance between political positions. The scientification of politics describes how lawmakers understand their disagreement. Two legislators can disagree intensely and still bargain if each recognizes the other as a political equal pursuing a legitimate end. Bargaining becomes much harder when one understands the disagreement as a contest between truth and ignorance. Politics then begins to resemble administration, or the application of expertise to a problem to solve it.

The temptation is ancient. Plato’s Republic entrusts rule to philosopher-kings because they have escaped the cave and apprehended truths inaccessible to those who remain inside it. But Plato’s city is not a self-governing republic. It is a rulership. The philosopher-kings do not practice politics in the American sense. They administer what they know to be true to achieve intended outcomes.

Political Judgment Is Different

Scientific thinking cannot fix Congress because political judgment does not work the same way as scientific fact. For example, consider the proposition that the sun rises in the east. Its validity does not depend on whether Democrats and Republicans agree. Political activity adds nothing to its truth. It remains true whether Congress votes on it or not.

Now consider the proposition that the minimum wage should be $15 an hour or that carbon emissions should be reduced by a specified amount. Science can inform lawmakers about the likely consequences of those choices. That is, economists can estimate the effects of raising the minimum wage on employment. And climate scientists can model future warming and make forecasts based on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But neither group of experts can tell Americans and their elected representatives whether they believe that the expected benefits of a policy justify its costs or how to prioritize competing policy demands.

Those are political judgments. They do not exist independently of politics waiting to be discovered by experts. They emerge from the activity of citizens and their representatives adjudicating their disagreements and deciding what they are willing to do together.

That is why political legitimacy differs from scientific legitimacy. Scientific legitimacy results from the method used to establish whether an assertion is valid. Political legitimacy arises out of an activity in which political equals deliberate, bargain, negotiate, and make collective decisions despite their continuing disagreement. Politics is unnecessary where genuine consensus already exists. But it is needed when people disagree and no one has authority to make a final decision unilaterally.

Politics is therefore needed to make compromise possible. Its disagreement creates the conditions that result in compromise. Participants in public debates do not have to agree about the truth of every proposition before acting together to adopt it. Each may retain his own understanding of what the outcome should be and still accept an outcome that they would not have chosen at the outset.

Congress’s dysfunction stems from the loss of this understanding among lawmakers and many of their constituents. Lawmakers increasingly avoid the conflict and uncertainty inherent in legislative politics and instead substitute stage-managed proceedings designed to keep them at bay and produce predictable results. Reformers outside Congress who advocate for procedural silver bullets reflect the same impulse. Both groups assume that the right mechanism, properly designed, can eliminate the need for difficult political choices.

Institutional design matters. The Constitution demonstrates that. But institutions should facilitate political activity, not substitute for it.

That does not mean that procedural reform itself is useless. Rather, it means that reforms aimed at making the legislative process more fluid and participatory can reduce Congress’s dysfunction more than those seeking to make it more efficient. Procedural reforms that give lawmakers a space to adjudicate their disagreements by offering amendments and forcing votes on issues in committees and on the House and Senate floors are needed to create the institutional conditions needed for Congress to work.

The more problematic reforms are those aimed at removing that disagreement from the legislative process altogether, like putting government funding on autopilot and delegating difficult choices to experts and commissions. The critical question is not whether a reform makes Congress more efficient at producing certain policy outcomes. It is whether a reform helps lawmakers engage in the debate over what those outcomes should be in the first place.

Congress Needs More Politics

The Constitution’s separation of powers and bicameral legislature depend on diversity and disagreement to function. James Madison understood the extended republic to be an advantage because it contained people with different interests, passions, and opinions. That activity matters because no one lawmaker can determine the public good by themselves. The imperative of politics requires them to confront their colleagues’ perspectives instead of ignoring them. Compromise reflects something no individual participant possessed at the outset—a broader understanding about what the public wants and will tolerate

None of this is efficient in the scientific sense.

Politics is unpredictable. It takes time. It often produces outcomes no expert would have designed in advance. But that is not evidence of its failure. It is an inevitable consequence of governing ourselves. The scientification of politics obscures this reality. It encourages lawmakers to understand their task as discovering the objectively correct policy and ensuring its efficient implementation. When agreement on that policy proves impossible, Congress does nothing.

Congress is not supposed to operate like a scientific laboratory or factory. Its purpose is to provide a place where Americans, through their elected representatives, confront their disagreements and decide what they are willing to do together in the name of the public good. Scientific expertise can tell lawmakers a great deal about the world in which they make those decisions. It can’t make those decisions for them.

That distinction points toward a different standard for congressional reform. Congress should not be judged primarily by whether it produces predetermined outcomes more efficiently. Reforms should instead be judged by whether they make it easier for lawmakers to participate meaningfully in the process—to debate and amend legislation—and compromise.

Americans are right to be frustrated when Congress fails to act. But they misunderstand the problem if they assume Congress doesn’t act primarily because it lacks the right procedure or sufficient technical expertise.