Congress writes laws but rarely follows up on how they are implemented. When things inevitably go wrong, it passes the buck to agencies, which often hire consultants to investigate the problem at great expense. However, Congress could do the job itself for free. Congress already employs a cadre of staff that knows the gory details of government programs—namely, caseworkers.
Caseworkers are staff employed by members of Congress to help their constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy. When the public has problems with federal agencies—everything from mishandled disability applications to poor postal service—caseworkers are the go-between to sort things out. In helping the public, caseworkers learn how the implementation of government programs can go awry.
Congress invests heavily in casework; by our calculations, caseworkers are about 15 percent of Congressional office staff. But Congress does not tap into their knowledge, largely because caseworkers are based in their home districts, where they work with constituents in person. As caseworkers are far from the politics of the U.S. Capitol, the Washington establishment often wrongly thinks of them as merely entry-level customer service representatives.
Instead, Congress should recognize that they are subject-matter experts and put their knowledge to use. Congress could benefit from their expertise by turning caseworkers loose on three problems: identifying root causes of dysfunction, spotting emerging problems, and creating better-informed policy.
Caseworkers could help identify the source of longstanding problems. When they determine why the bureaucracy made a mistake for constituents, they often discover the underlying cause. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sometimes improperly continues paying dependent benefits to disabled soldiers even after their children become too old to be eligible. These veterans later discover that their disability checks have been cut off and the VA is demanding that they repay tens of thousands of dollars. Caseworkers who assist these veterans know the cause: the VA has no way for veterans to amend their listed dependents themselves. These changes must be made manually by bureaucrats, with only a handful of employees processing updates for the entire country.
To fix these longstanding problems, oversight staff should consult caseworkers for their insight. Congressional committees that oversee agencies providing social services could host a "staff day" at the beginning of each Congress, incorporating caseworkers' expertise into their oversight plans.
Casework could provide Congress with an early warning signal to spot emerging problems. For example, Rep. Loudermilk's staff (R-Ga.) had rarely received postal complaints until March 2024, when they began receiving tens and then hundreds of complaints about mail delays and missing items. His caseworkers soon uncovered that Georgia was the testing ground for a new U.S. Postal Service reorganization. After discovering this, lawmakers conducted oversight to ensure tax returns and primary ballots would be delivered promptly.
To help other offices replicate this success, Congress needs data management tools that summarize complaints heard by individual legislators. The House has already begun creating a dashboard of anonymized casework data, which could also be adopted by the Senate. Congressional committees should use these tools for oversight and invest in their success.
Congress could ask caseworkers to help write better laws in the future. Lawmakers may not understand implementation details but good caseworkers do. For example, the proposed TAS Act aims to address common taxpayer complaints about the IRS; it draws upon recommendations from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, which in turn drew upon Congressional casework inquiries.
Congress should prioritize incorporating such insight directly from caseworkers. Congressional committees might even borrow experienced caseworkers to provide input in strengthening draft bills, in addition to incorporating casework data into oversight plans.
In today's era of low trust in government, good casework matters more than ever. Caseworkers are the first line of defense for constituents, demonstrating that interactions with government can reflect trust, accountability, and dignity. More than that, caseworkers could rebuild trust in government by helping Congress hold the government accountable and write better laws. This requires that Congress take casework more seriously and view it as an integral part of oversight and legislation.
So, the next time Congress wants to sort out a thorny problem, it shouldn't send agencies running to consultants to find solutions. Instead, lawmakers should schedule a happy hour with their caseworkers.
Anne Meeker is a former Director of Constituent Services and Deputy Director of POPVOX Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps democratic institutions keep pace with a rapidly changing world.
Kevin Hawickhorst is a Policy Analyst at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank that develops technology, talent, and ideas that support a better, freer, and more abundant future.
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.