It's easy to go in to Congress and spend. It's much harder to go in and do what's right. Ten years after the wave of Tea Party reformers arrived at the Capitol, we're still spending without any concern for the long-term implications or the next generation.
We just crossed $22 trillion in debt and are heading toward $30 trillion. This year we are running ever-larger deficits while ignoring the underlying cause of the debt, especially entitlement programs.
We're doing the same thing at the state and local levels — spending without the ability to pay and kicking the can down the road. We continue to shirk our fiscal responsibility. And, as long as we do, the new decade will be just as lost as the last one.
Congress can take steps to fix the problem, and if the current members can't get the job done, then it's up to voters to remind them who's in charge. Here are some steps for changing the way the place works that I believe would go a long way toward ending dysfunction in Washington.
Return to regular order. It's simple: Committee chairmen should be freely elected by the committee members, not chosen by House leadership, and they should be focused on running their committees. Then bills should be drafted in committee and debated among all committee members. Then they should be presented to the committee chairman, and if there are enough votes, sent to the floor of the House for more debate.
Lastly, hearings should return to their original purpose of being fact-finding tools so Congress can make better informed decisions. They should not be used to reinforce the party line.
Balance the budget. Every year Congress needs to pass a budget, and the president should give an annual Fiscal State of the Union so that members have a clear picture of the government's financial health.
We need to eliminate the gimmicks — no more continuing resolutions, Rules Committee hijinks with the waiving of budget requirements, and no emergency expenditures unless they're absolutely justified.
Every member of the House should be required to take a turn on the Budget Committee. Since no one wants to take the hard votes, the Budget Committee is Washington's equivalent of Siberia. If we made a rotation on Budget mandatory, it would force everyone to understand the hard choices we face.
Establish term limits. Incumbents' ability to raise money allows most of them to stay in office as long as they want. Putting a limit on their length of service is the only answer. Any limits need to be pure term limits so members can't jump back and forth between the House and the Senate for years.
I would argue for a limit of five terms in the House (10 years) and two in the Senate (12 years). And no person should be able to hold federal office for more than 16 years anywhere, including the presidency and vice presidency.
Reform leadership. Leadership positions in Congress have become too powerful. Committee chairmen and the speaker need to be overseers and administrators, ensuring that members are following the proper protocol and that legislation is progressing as it should. They shouldn't be impeding the process or allowing for partisan victories at the expense of sound policy.
In addition, the House should consider electing a speaker who is not a member of Congress — but an esteemed public servant who has a proven record of statesmanship but is no longer beholden to a political party. In effect, lawmakers would hire an outside administrator, agreed upon by a majority from both parties.
Restrict campaign donations. Simply capping donations at the current limits of $2,700 for a federal candidate from individuals and $5,000 a year from political action committees doesn't work. It's too easy to disguise or spread the money around. We need to limit donations by source, including the political parties.
Vote from home. The main reason lawmakers go to Washington is to vote. If members could vote from home, we could save millions of dollars a year in travel costs.
As it stands right now, the only way to track your vote is for you to vote on the floor of the House or Senate. But this is really just a matter of changing the rules and setting up a secure website, with identity verification, to collect the votes.
Concentrate on committee work. Rather than allowing committees to meet whenever they want, we should squeeze all the committee work into a few weeks and require that lawmakers stay in Washington until their work is done. Combined with voting from home, this would force members to be more productive.
In Texas, lawmakers meet for only five months once every two years. It forces them to get things done. The longer the session, the more mistakes people can make.
Know your adversary. Washington has descended into tribalism and identity politics. No matter how bitterly we disagree, everyone working to govern the country must recognize the need to cooperate.
Committee meetings are segregated by party so Democrats and Republicans have little interaction. Committee chairmen could address this problem by requiring that the entire committee meet in the same room.
Individual members should sit down to breakfast and do whatever it takes to find common ground. The opposing party isn't the enemy. We are all on the same side — the side of America and democracy.
Disagreeing on policy is healthy. Refusing to speak to one another because we disagree isn't.
These are just a few ideas for how to make the federal government work better and get the legislative process back on track, so it's actually fixing problems that matter to people rather than helping the political elite score points and get ahead.
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.