Strand is president of the Congressional Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to help members of Congress better serve their constituents and their constituents better understand Congress. He testified before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in March.
As the House of Representatives marches toward a partisan impeachment, the American public can be forgiven for missing a bright spot of productive bipartisanship: the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. After an encouraging year of bipartisan committee work, the House voted last week to extend the panel for a year.
This committee has made 29 unanimous recommendations to improve technology, transparency, accessibility and constituent engagement as well as provide better support for staff. Twenty-nine unanimous recommendations. And these aren't boiler plate measures like "The House should have more transparency." They are well thought-out solutions that can be taken up by committees of jurisdiction, such as allowing new members to hire a transition staffer, promoting civility during new-member orientation, streamlining bill writing and finalizing a system to easily track how amendments would alter legislation and impact current law.
The committee's members wanted to be part of this work. They understand how important it is for the House to catch up with modern times. There's still a lot of work to do, though, which is why it's great they will be able to continue through the end of 2020.
The success so far is due to the panel's bipartisan nature. The six members from each party, led by Democratic Chairman Derek Kilmer of Washington and GOP Vice Chairman Tom Graves of Georgia, have spent countless hours meeting with each other, their colleagues and outside groups that are focused on various aspects of federal modernization.
The Congressional Institute is one of those groups. For several years, we have advocated for reforming Congress to make it effective. Few would say Congress is working as well as it should. Partisan gridlock certainly plays an enormous role in this, but there are institutional changes that have nothing to do with politics that will help modernize both the House and the Senate.
We have looked at a number of issues including fixing the authorization process to restore checks and balances, instituting biennial budgeting, changing the start of the federal fiscal year from Oct. 1 to Jan. 1, and even restoring earmarks both as a legislative tool and to shift funding decisions from the executive branch back to the legislative branch — where the Constitution says they belong.
For years, Congress has fallen short of its budget responsibility. The process has become a farce with continuing resolutions — which are supposed to act as short-term patches allowing the government to run while Congress continues debate — acting as budgeting tools. The 35-day shutdown that ended in January should be all the evidence and incentive lawmakers need to reform that process.
It has been 25 years since the last time Congress completed a budget on time — meaning the 12 separate bills designed to provide funding for all discretionary programs were passed and signed by the start of the fiscal year. Since then, CRs and catchall spending packages have become chronic, and have come to be seen as an acceptable way of doing business.
Except that it's not.
Deviations from the intended appropriations mechanisms have greatly reduced Congress' role in shaping the budget and eroded its responsibility to conduct proper oversight. As the budget process has broken down, the authority to negotiate with the White House shifted to Hill leaders, giving administration officials little incentive to engage with committee chairmen.
As Congress ceded its position as a co-equal in the budget process, it also drifted away from authorizations and appropriations as a regular course of business. Congress enacted about $310 billion in unauthorized appropriations four years ago, according to the Congressional Budget Office — about one-third of all discretionary funding. The amount has grown precipitously since 1985, when the CBO began keeping track of money allocated to programs not actually authorized by Congress.
The way to stop this from happening is to revive the authorization process by giving power back to the committees assigned to write that sort if legislation.
It's also time to consider a two-year budget cycle as a way to give lawmakers more time to do their work. Biennial budgeting can reduce the impact of politics on the process. And focusing on authorizing in one year, and spending in the next, would help members better and more effectively focus on both their tasks.
Fixing the budget and getting spending under control are hardly the only targets for reform.
Public approval for Congress is near the record low. Too many Americans feel their legislators aren't listening to them and aren't looking out for their best interests. Helping members more effectively engage with the people they were elected to represent will show the public that lawmakers do care. Those of us who worked on Capitol Hill know this to be true.
Opening up the legislative process to more amendments on the House floor would give members incentives to participate rather than feeling like spectators.
In March, the Modernization Committee set aside a day where 32 House members testified and another three provided written comments. What they talked about included the unpredictable nature of the congressional schedule, challenges setting up district offices for new members, antiquated technology, and staffing capacity and workforce concerns.
Members are clearly concerned for the future of Congress. These are not partisan or political concerns. In fact, that's one reason the committee has been successful: It has been careful to avoid political considerations. It is working hard to make smart, common-sense recommendations that can be turned into legislative proposals, although maybe not all right away. Hopefully a few years from now someone will still say: "The Kilmer-Graves committee had this great idea; let's adopt it."
That's why it's so important that the House voted to let the committee continue. It's refreshing to see members of the two parties work together. They have earned the respect of their colleagues. They, and many outside groups that are advocating to make Congress effective, look forward to what the Modernization Committee accomplishes next year.
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.