Today, looking closer at just how dysfunctional the United States Congress has become, and what we might do to fix it. The Gallup poll found in January 2022 that American approval of the job the US Congress is doing had fallen to 18%, one of the lowest points in the last 50 years. The last Congress under President Trump passed the fewest bills that got signed into law of any Congress going back to 1973. And that record-breaking level of futility has become almost commonplace in the last decade since the three sessions of Congress from 2011-2017 were some of the least productive on record. Â The Congress almost never does its annual homework assignment of passing individual appropriations bills, engages in stunts like the House voting to repeal or amend the Affordable Care Act more than 50 times with no hope of success, and seems continually locked in partisan flame wars.
Our guest today examined a slice of this problem in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post titled “House committees are hearing from fewer witnesses. That hurts public policy.” So today we look not only at that specific problem, but also the larger issue of just how off-track one of our three branches of government has gone, and what we can do to fix it.
Dr. Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the US Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the US Postal Service. Dr. Kosar spent more than a decade working for the Congressional Research Service, where he focused on a wide range of public administration issues. He has taught public policy at New York University and lectured on public administration at Metropolitan College of New York. He’s written numerous books including “Moonshine: A Global History” (Reaktion Books, 2017) and “Whiskey: A Global History” (Reaktion Books, 2010).
