Ineffective communication between members of Congress and their constituents has led to a breakdown in trust in government and democratic institutions, a recent report found.
Lawmakers are inundated with constituent messages every day, but they lack the resources and training for how to respond effectively. As a result, most Americans do not feel heard by their representatives and have become disillusioned with politics, according to the Congressional Management Foundation's latest report, "The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue."
The 48-page report, released Wednesday, analyzes these communication problems and offers guidance for how to improve engagement between representatives and constituents.
Congress' approach to communicating with the public is stuck in the 1970s, said Bradford Fitch, president and CEO of CMF.
"Few offices are rethinking their engagement with constituents to facilitate inclusive opportunities to invite constituents to contribute substantively to public policy," he said. "Congress needs to change its thinking and goals — engage in a paradigm shift from just 'answering the mail' to building trust in our democratic institutions."
One of the main factors contributing to this issue is the fact that members of Congress receive more communications from constituents now than ever before, but they lack the staff and budget to keep up with it.
While House members are allowed to have up to 18 staff members, most have fewer because their budgets of $1.5 million cannot support 18 salaries. (Not to mention the low pay many congressional staffers receive due to these budget constraints, although Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently raised the cap on staff salaries and Democrats have proposed a corresponding budget increase to make that possible.) Senators do not have limits on the number of staffers they can employ, but most have between 35 and 70, depending on their budget.
And over the years, the number of constituents each lawmaker represents has grown significantly. As of 2020, each House member had an average of 761,000 constituents — three times the amount when the number of representatives was frozen at 435 during the Taft administration. Additionally, Senators represent as little as 580,000 citizens (in the least populous state, Wyoming) to as many as 40 million people (California).
Recent technological innovations have contributed to the increase in messages lawmakers receive. However, Congress has been slow to embrace new technology, and the tools representatives do use often turn contact from constituents into data points, rather than substantive engagements.
As a result, everyday citizens do not feel heard by Congress, nor do they believe the government is working in their best interest. Nine in 10 Americans believe the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, rather than for the benefit of all people. By comparison, in the 1960s, two-thirds of Americans felt the government was run for the benefit of all people.
Trust in government has also declined since the 1960s, when three-quarters of people said they trusted the government to do what's right "just about always or most of the time." In 2018, less than one-fifth of Americans said the same.
"Practices by both the public and Congress have led to the relationship between Congress and the People being viewed as purely transactional, not the robust, substantive democratic engagement envisioned for a modern democratic republic," the report says.
To help rebuild a foundation for effective communication between members of Congress and their constituents, CMF recommends following these 10 principles:
- Congressional engagement should foster trust in members, Congress and democracy.
- Congress should robustly embrace and facilitate Americans' First Amendment rights.
- Congress must robustly collect, aggregate and analyze meaningful knowledge from diverse sources.
- Senators and representatives should strive to engage with a diverse sample of their constituents, not just those who vote for them or seek to influence them.
- Congress should provide additional and diverse avenues for public participation.
- Congressional engagement should promote accessibility for all.
- While individual members should prioritize engagement with their own constituents, Congress should develop additional venues for public policy participation and engagement.
- Constituents should be honest and transparent in their engagement with Congress.
- Constituent advocacy must prioritize content and quality over medium and quantity.
- Input from the public should be integrated with other sources of information for Congress to make good public policy decisions.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.