How Congress Lost Its Capacity to Act and How to Get It Back

In late 2025, Congress fumbled the Affordable Care Act, failing to move a modest stabilization bill through its own procedures and leaving insurers and families facing renewed uncertainty. As the Congressional Budget Office has warned in multiple analyses over the past decade, policy uncertainty increases premiums and reduces insurer participation (see, for example: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61734). I examined this episode in an earlier Fulcrum article, “Governing by Breakdown: The Cost of Congressional Paralysis,” as a case study in congressional paralysis and leadership failure. The deeper problem, however, runs beyond any single deadline or decision and into the incentives and procedures that now structure congressional authority. Polarization has become so embedded in America’s governing institutions themselves that it shapes how power is exercised and why even routine governance now breaks down.

From Episode to System

The ACA episode wasn’t an anomaly but a symptom. Recent scholarship suggests it reflects a broader structural shift in how Congress operates. In a 2025 academic article available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), political scientist Dmitrii Lebedev reaches a stark conclusion about the current Congress, noting that the 118th Congress enacted fewer major laws than any in the modern era despite facing multiple time-sensitive policy deadlines (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5346916). Drawing on legislative data, he finds that dysfunction is no longer best understood as partisan gridlock alone. Instead, Congress increasingly exhibits a breakdown of institutional capacity within the governing majority itself. Leadership avoidance, procedural delay, and the erosion of governing norms have become routine features of legislative life rather than temporary responses to crisis.

Polarization Inside the Machinery

Taken together, these developments reveal a troubling transformation in American politics. Polarization no longer operates only at the level of ideas or elections; it now reshapes how governing institutions function by organizing incentives, shaping how rules are used, deadlines are managed, and responsibility is avoided. The result is a Congress that can sustain conflict indefinitely but struggles to complete even time-sensitive, widely understood tasks of governance.

Why Non-Governance Now Makes Political Sense

None of this was accidental; it helps explain why paralysis persists rather than resolves itself. Years of partisan polarization have reshaped congressional incentives so that avoidance is often safer than action. In an outrage-driven media environment, governing carries real political risk, while doing nothing frequently carries fewer immediate costs.

Under these conditions, delay becomes a rational strategy rather than a sign of failure. Allowing deadlines to approach or blocking action through procedural maneuvering lets lawmakers signal partisan loyalty without owning the consequences. The resulting harms—higher premiums, delayed projects, policy instability—are diffuse and delayed, while the political rewards of obstruction are immediate. Over time, this logic reshapes institutional behavior: leadership shifts from assembling majorities to managing avoidance, committees lose authority, and what appears as chaos from the outside hardens into a stable equilibrium in which non-governance is the safest political choice.

The Executive Backfill Problem

As Congress’s capacity to act erodes, power does not disappear; it shifts decisively toward the executive branch. Legislative paralysis invites presidents to backfill governing functions through executive orders, waivers, reinterpretations, and expansive emergency authorities. These conditions are ideal for an opportunist like Donald Trump, who treats congressional weakness as an opportunity rather than a constraint. Today’s Republican Congress often functions less as a check on executive ambition than as an enabling environment for it.

Over time, this pattern weakens Congress further, initiating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. When major policy choices are deferred to the executive branch, lawmakers lose both expertise and leverage. Oversight becomes reactive rather than anticipatory, and statutory clarity gives way to improvisation. Agencies are asked to solve political problems they were never designed to resolve, while courts are pulled into disputes that originate in legislative avoidance rather than constitutional conflict.

The result is a feedback loop: congressional dysfunction accelerates executive action, which in turn normalizes governing without Congress. Each cycle makes it harder to restore regular order, reinforcing a system in which polarization does not merely divide institutions but actively reorganizes where and how governing authority resides.

Institutions Caught in the Middle

Think of these institutions as hospital emergency rooms overwhelmed by patients because the public health system has stopped functioning. Federal agencies were built to carry out laws, not to improvise care in the absence of legislative direction. Yet as Congress retreats, agencies are forced into triage—stretching statutory language to keep programs alive and prevent collapse. Career experts are pulled into partisan crossfire, weakening professional norms and leaving institutions exhausted and overextended.

Courts face a similar problem. Judges are increasingly asked to decide disputes over immigration enforcement, public‑health measures, student debt relief, and regulatory authority—not because the law is unclear, but because Congress failed to legislate. In effect, judges are pushed into triage, making decisions that should never have reached the courts. Over time, this drags courts beyond their role of restraint, threatens their legitimacy, and deepens perceptions of politicization. The result is predictable: public trust erodes, and the lines between making the law, enforcing it, and interpreting it blur.

Restoring the Guardrails

Reversing this trajectory will not be easy, but it is possible. The first step is to reassert that the process itself is a democratic value. Budgets passed on time, votes held even when outcomes are uncomfortable, and committees empowered to do sustained work are not procedural niceties; they are the guardrails that keep power from pooling dangerously in any one branch.

Congress must reclaim its institutional role by restoring regular order by limiting leadership’s ability to block votes on must-pass legislation, strengthening committee authority, and reestablishing predictable budget timelines. These reforms are politically difficult precisely because they reduce opportunities for avoidance, but without them, paralysis will remain the path of least resistance.

Citizens also have a role to play. Voters and donors routinely reward performative conflict while tolerating institutional failure. Rebuilding guardrails requires changing those incentives by treating chronic non-governance, procedural sabotage, and deadline brinkmanship as disqualifying behavior rather than partisan virtue. Civic organizations, media outlets, and voters alike must place greater value on governing competence and institutional stewardship.

Finally, restoring balance means resisting the temptation to normalize executive improvisation as a substitute for legislation. As long as Congress continues to yield responsibility, opportunistic executives will continue to fill the vacuum. Emergency powers and administrative workarounds should be exceptional resorts of last resort, not standing tools of governance. Without renewed legislative responsibility, executive backfill will continue to expand, and the system’s remaining guardrails will erode further.

The choice facing American democracy is not simply between left and right, or even between parties. It is between a system that governs through durable institutions and one that drifts toward permanent improvisation, which is a sure-fire recipe for political chaos. Guardrails can be rebuilt, but only if Americans decide that a functioning democracy is worth the discomfort of governing again.

Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.