Fitch is the president and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation and a former congressional staffer.
Many Americans think they know Congress by reading the news and watching House and Senate floor activities. What most people don’t know is that Congress is made up of 535 small businesses, each managed by a lawmaker who makes all the decisions a small-business leader must make. Everything from establishing salaries to managing employee benefits to setting the strategic direction the office will take.
And like small businesses, each congressional office has a “customer service” operation to cater to the needs and requests of its constituents. The Congressional Management Foundation has been studying the business aspects of running congressional offices for decades and has recognized the best in Congress through our Democracy Awards. These “Oscars for Congress,” co-founded with the Bridge Alliance (which operates The Fulcrum), is the only nonpartisan objective assessment of the individual performance of members of Congress and of their staffs’ accountability to constituents.
The Democracy Awards were designed to identify those public servants who rise above their colleagues in vision and practice responsiveness to constituents. Just like a business provides customer service, members of Congress and their staff all have constituent service operations. Here are five characteristics of congressional offices that successfully serve the American people.
One common characteristic of successful offices is leadership vision. One winner, Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), has established “stewardship” as one of the top values the office follows. This manifests itself in several ways, including connecting constituents with the governor’s office for state-related matters and helping constituents find access to food and shelter through local agencies and support systems.
A second characteristic is the establishment of metrics. In less than four years in office, Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) has closed 5,573 cases, recovered $24,628,317 on behalf of constituents, and hosted close to 20 virtual workshops. Her office has guided constituents through interactions with the federal government, such as signing up for Medicare, filing taxes or achieving a small-business certification.
The third characteristic of great constituent service in Congress is establishing a culture of service. Underwood’s staff report they are guided by the following values: service, integrity, responsiveness, productivity, accessibility, kindness and excellence. In Johnson’s office, part of the customer service culture is based on creativity. During the pandemic, with face-to-face contact unavailable, the office set up “Drive-Thru Dusty Town Halls," where the congressman met constituents in parking lots and they yelled questions while he answered from the back of a pick-up truck.
A fourth characteristic is to offer diverse means and channels to access. Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) has fun with the “B” in his name, inviting constituents to "break bread" with Barry by hosting public events at local restaurants, naming them "Breakfast with Barry," "Burgers with Barry" and "Buffet with Barry." Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.) hosts regular virtual and mobile district office hours, which is an opportunity for constituents to meet one-on-one with their representative.
The fifth characteristic is a willingness to accept criticism. If DeSaulnier finds someone on social media disagreeing with him, his staff will reach out to set up an appointment so he can hear their point of view. He also refuses to leave any town hall meeting until every question (and questioner) is exhausted. After completing work with individual constituents, Moore’s office sends them a survey to provide feedback – both good and bad. This enables the staff to change and improve their processes so that they can provide better constituent services.
It's hard to have a positive view of Congress with the barrage of news stories touting their imperfections and foibles. Yet Americans must understand that even though they rarely see the good side of Congress, public servants are tirelessly aiming to respond to the needs and aspirations of their constituents. I’m not saying they’re all saints – they’re not. Yet nearly every member of Congress feels both a moral and a political obligation to provide the best service they can to their constituents.
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.