How oversight got overlooked
Congress weakened committees for internal reasons - and unintentionally weakened its position in the constitutional order as a result.
We often think of Congress’ primary job as lawmaking. After all, it is the legislative branch of government. But while the legislative branch is obviously the primary driver of new law, the role of Congress is much bigger: It also needs to oversee, on an ongoing basis, the implementation of existing law, the vast majority of which was produced years ago.
Think of Congress as the board of directors of a corporation. The executive branch is the actual company, making the widgets. The president of the United States is the CEO, managing the day to day operations of the company. Congress is the board of directors, setting broad policy and overseeing the CEO and the company on behalf of the voters. Most of the work is the oversight.
Traditionally, Congress has organized itself for oversight via the committee system. Unfortunately, the modern committee system has diminished to the point that it falls short of performing the necessary oversight of the executive branch.
Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Congress itself. Most observers correctly view the rise of partisanship — and the unwillingness of co-partisans to investigate their own administration — as a key driver of reduced oversight.
But over the past 30 years, both parties have also made internal institutional changes to the committee system that reduced the capacity and effectiveness of congressional oversight. More often than not, these changes were made for entirely other reasons, the reduced oversight merely an unfortunate byproduct.
First, committee budgets have stagnated. In 1995, Republicans cut funding for committees by a third; in real dollars, committee resources have never recovered, under either party. That’s even though total real federal spending has more than doubled in the same period ($3.1 trillion to $6.75 trillion in 2024 dollars). In short, the committees have far fewer resources for a far bigger job.
Second, member expertise has been curtailed. Republicans have instituted six-year term limits for committee chairs. Both parties have abandoned the once iron-clad seniority system in favor of more flexibility to replace chairs. And both parties now actively encourage backbench members to spend their time in Washington raising money rather than engaging in committee activity.
Reduced capacity and inexperienced members have contributed to a third problem, which is that Congress has largely given up on routine reauthorization of programs by the authorizing committees. They instead now rely on the appropriations process for implicit authorization as the statutory ones lapse, a poor substitute. Absent periodic statutory reauthorization, executive branch discretion has increased, the personal investment of members in the programs and their direction has diminished, and the oversight job has consequently gotten both bigger and harder.
Where you once had highly knowledgeable committee memberships led by chairs with decades of service, extensive political clout, and often better understandings of agencies than the administrators themselves, you now have just the opposite: committees with diminished experience and clout with the agencies and programs they are overseeing.
Congress was designed to be, and has so far always functioned as, a transformative legislature.
None of these changes were made with the goal of reducing oversight. Instead, they are largely byproducts of internal reorganizations of Congress made in order to centralize lawmaking power in the leadership. Increases in partisan polarization along ideology have created demands both inside and outside of Congress among partisans to streamline lawmaking and remove veto players who were ideological outliers.
Whereas the committee system of the mid-20th century protected the turf of party factions at odds with each other, by the early 21st century the same system was preventing more unified congressional parties from efficiently achieving their policy goals. Enhancing the power of the leadership to set the agenda, the details of bills, and the political messaging necessarily involved reducing committee authority, resources, and clout.
This reality — that Congress can harm its own standing in the separation of powers system merely by reorganizing its internal legislative processes and behaviors — has much wider consequences than many appreciate. Legislative parties, leaders, and backbench members are all cross-pressured by substantive, political, and electoral goals. Actions taken to achieve these goals within the institution necessarily affect the power, prestige, and capacity of Congress in the larger system.
Examples abound. Members routinely run for reelection by trashing Congress. This reduces public confidence in the legislature and helps the president win policy fights. House Republicans banned earmarks in 2011 amid ethics concerns, shifting decision-making authority over project funding into executive branch agencies. Scared of voter backlash, members routinely refuse to increase their pay or staffing levels, discouraging many talented politicians from making long careers in Congress and weakening their ability to politically take on the president.
Congress was designed to be, and has so far always functioned as, a transformative legislature — the chief venue where policy is developed, deliberated, amended, and often rejected. This stands in stark contrast to the role of the legislature in most parliamentary systems, where party politics mean the executive has far more direct control over the lawmakers who ostensibly elect her. Such parliaments are hollowed out and streamlined to become merely a conduit for the rubber-stamping of policy developed elsewhere, either in the administration or perhaps the parties.
There have always been those — starting with Woodrow Wilson and still present today in Washington — who believe Congress should be transformed to a parliamentary-style arena legislature. End the filibuster, sideline the committees, empower the leadership, and pass the bills.
In the context of separation of powers, however, this would be a disaster for Congress. Reforms that reduce the transformative nature of Congress will mostly accrue power to the presidency. The president, not the congressional leadership, is indisputably the party leader in the modern age, and one of Congress’s best collective checks on presidential power is its internal decentralized organization that resists streamlined legislative behavior.
For some — certainly Wilson — reducing Congress to a pass-through is the goal. But that would throw the baby out with the bathwater. The chief virtues of our legislature — diversity of membership, local representation, and public deliberation — cannot be replicated in the executive branch. A parliamentary-style legislature bootstrapped onto our constitutional structure would be the worst of all worlds, destroying these transformative virtues of Congress, while creating a presidency less efficient and less accountable than the parliamentary executives.
For contemporary members of Congress, resisting the urge to streamline internal legislative processes to achieve immediate substantive policy goals is incredibly difficult. The incentives to care about Congress as an institution within the separation of powers system have always been secondary and, in the current partisan climate, now have become outright dangerous politically.
But that makes it all the more pressing; recent administrations have been increasingly bold in their assertions of unilateral authority and encroachment on Congress’ spending power. Absent a response, members may find themselves with little left to defend.
Matt Glassman is a Senior Fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. He writes the newsletter Matt’s Five Points.
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