Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Blank Checks and Empty Promises: The Collapse of Congressional Fiscal Power

Blank Checks and Empty Promises: The Collapse of Congressional Fiscal Power

A politician counting money in front of the US Capitol Building.

Getty Images, fStop Images - Antenna

From Governing to Grandstanding

There was a time—believe it or not—when Congress actually passed budgets the old-fashioned way: through debate, compromise, and the occasional all-night session, not theatrics designed to appeal to cable news and social media. The process, while messy, followed a structure: hearings, markups, votes, and compromises. That structure—known as regular order—wasn’t just congressional tradition. It was the scaffolding of democratic accountability. It has also been steadily torn down.

Deadlines and dysfunction better define today’s Congress. Instead of the back-and-forth of healthy deliberation, Congress relies on continuing resolutions and last-minute omnibus bills. Budget gimmicks that were once used only during fiscal emergencies—backloaded cuts, timing shifts, reconciliation sleight-of-hand—are now the rule, not the exception. Congress has shifted from prioritizing policy to prioritizing the message and crafting political narratives.


Driving this breakdown is a Republican Party shaped not by governing principles but by its loyalty to President Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s caucus should be asserting its constitutional power of the purse. Instead, it has abandoned regular order in favor of placating a base animated more by grievance than governance. The result is a budget process that functions like performance art—and legislators that no longer legislate. This development spells long-term trouble for American democracy.

Into this legislative breakdown walks Donald Trump. Again. The void left by a Congress that no longer governs is exactly the kind of chaos he thrives in. And one cannot help but wonder: was this the plan all along?

Project 2025: The Blueprint Behind the Breakdown

This is nothing short of a fundamental reshaping of political control that mirrors the blueprint set forth in Project 2025. The plan calls for a significant expansion of executive power, aiming to centralize control over the federal government and diminish the role of Congress in policymaking. By abandoning regular order and enabling executive overreach, Congress is following Project 2025 more than the Constitution.

The GOP, having discovered that theatrics keep the base agitated and Fox News profitable, has largely abandoned the tedious business of actual governance. Why slog through negotiation or accountability when it’s easier to grab headlines by railing against wokeness or staging floor votes with the flair of a reality show challenge? This is no longer the party of policy memos and fiscal restraint—where Paul Ryan once diagrammed tax reform on a whiteboard, it’s the party where Marjorie Taylor Greene now delivers performance art in committee hearings.

A Budget That Punishes the Poor and Rewards the Rich

While spectacle plays well on right-wing media, the real-world consequences are disastrous. Government agencies—those actually tasked with carrying out the laws Congress no longer bothers to pass—are forced to run under stopgap funding or arbitrary cuts. Programs with broad public support, from food assistance to medical research, are being defunded. And long-term planning? Forget it. Agencies can’t hire, invest, or innovate when they don’t know if they’ll have money in six weeks.

When a continuing resolution expires and families lose access to childcare subsidies or small businesses cannot get SBA loans, there’s no hearing, no apology—just another round of blame roulette. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) can release projections showing millions will lose Medicaid or food assistance, and the House majority’s response is a shrug and a recycled talking point about "wasteful spending."

In May, the nonpartisan CBO issued a stark analysis of the House’s budget proposal, projecting that the lowest-income households would see their household budgets shrink by up to 4% by 2033, due to cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans would see their household resources rise by a similar margin, thanks to tax cuts. It's not just a lopsided budget—it’s a stealthy act of redistribution, carried out behind the curtain, without hearings, debate, or even much public notice. What looks like dysfunction is a calculated method of governing without accountability.

The Way Back: Deliberation, Not Drama

The consequences stretch far beyond the spreadsheet. It seeps into public trust. When people see that Congress can’t—or won’t—do its most basic job of funding the government responsibly, they naturally tune out. That vacuum becomes fertile ground for executive overreach and cynicism about democratic institutions.

Right now, we’re speeding in the wrong direction—with no one at the wheel.

So how do we turn things around?

Restoring regular order in budgeting may not produce headlines, but it’s essential. Even Republicans like Senator John Thune agree. That means rejecting manufactured crises and recommitting to the slow, steady work of debate, deliberation, and compromise.

It also means reclaiming Congress’s constitutional duty to manage the nation’s finances—not perform in a never-ending political reality show.

Democrats may not have the votes to fix this alone. But they can still lead by example—and remind voters what responsible governing actually looks like.


Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University. Follow on LinkedIn

.

Read More

Outside Money, Inside Influence: How National Donors Shaped the 2024 Congressional Elections

An individual voting with money.

Getty Images, Orbon Alija

Outside Money, Inside Influence: How National Donors Shaped the 2024 Congressional Elections

In 2024, campaign fundraising in federal elections was more nationalized than ever. Candidates for both the House and Senate continued a decades-long trend of relying less on donations from the voters they represent and more on contributions from donors across the country. The nationalization of campaign contributions, once a concern among elections experts, is now a defining feature of congressional campaigns.

An analysis of 2024 House and Senate campaign data reveals just how deeply this transformation has taken hold. From candidates in small states with limited donor bases to top congressional leaders with national profiles — and especially in competitive races in battleground states — non-local campaign contributions were ubiquitous.

Keep ReadingShow less
Who Really Pays for Congress? Local Donors All but Disappear in 2024

Hundred dollar bills.

Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Who Really Pays for Congress? Local Donors All but Disappear in 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C. - There is an old saying: All politics is local. However, many voters may get the impression this is becoming less and less a reality -- particularly in US House and Senate elections where candidates are elected to represent specific districts or states, but campaign to a national audience.

This is because local influence in the most contested races is dying out -- a statement not contrived from opinion, but fact.

Keep ReadingShow less
Money in politics
Super PACs tied to major parties misled voters, complaint alleges
erhui1979/Getty Images

Is It Possible To Reverse Course on the Corruptive Influence of Money in American Politics?

A $288 Billion Dollar Proto-Presidency?

The 2024 presidential election saw Elon Musk spend over a quarter of a billion to elect President Trump, which is exactly $288 million according to The  Washington Post report of the final tally of campaign spending on January 31, 2025. Did that staggering campaign contribution buy the billionaire the right to attend cabinet meetings and stand beside the President in the Oval Office and at other events? Did those millions buy a Proto-Presidency, complete with the opportunity to run a department aggressively dismantling government and radically changing what government does for ordinary Americans while personally benefiting from government contracts? Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that ‘Musk is the clearest example of the corrupting influence of money in politics.’ According to a recent PEW study, 72% of Americans agree that money is the number one corrupting influence in politics. So, what can be done? Are we too far down this road to make meaningful change, or are there options?

Keep ReadingShow less
Three diverse professionals  in business attire smiling and posing in an office
‘Black jobs’ slur and anti-DEI mindset are bad for business
LaylaBird/Getty Images

The Calculated Dismantling of Minority Business Opportunity in America

A recent executive order to dismantle the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) is another policy change in America's long history of systematically suppressing minority economic advancement. This decision, which threatens to unravel decades of progress in fostering minority entrepreneurship, demands immediate attention and action.

Since its inception, the MBDA has been a lifeline for America's 12 million minority-owned businesses, facilitating access to over $1.5 billion in capital in 2024 alone. Its dissolution represents the loss of a government agency and the destruction of a crucial bridge to economic opportunity for countless entrepreneurs from marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less