Congress' Lack of Transparency is a Choice

People like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are right to call out the madness of the modern Congress.

The federal government seems to be headed for a shutdown after Congress failed to pass a stop-gap funding bill that includes “emergency” items like a pay raise for itself. We’ll no doubt learn more about what was slipped into the bill in coming days. But what is even more scandalous than the product is the process.

Dropping a 1,500-page bill on a legislator’s desk and demanding they pass it without having time to review it projects weakness and corruption to both American taxpayers and our adversaries. The process is particularly insulting to disaster victims in North Carolina who are going to find assistance delayed even further due to Congress’ inability to set priorities and make hard decisions.

The absurdity of today’s process is not normal. People like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are right to call out the madness of the modern Congress.

The solution to this week’s budget debacle isn’t a better or less odious continuing resolution but a reimagined budget process built around our founders’ vision of limited government that gives the federal government far less power over our lives than it currently exercises.

As the graph below illustrates, Congress hasn’t done its most basic job of considering, debating and passing its appropriations bills in 27 years.

SOURCE: Axios Visuals; DATA: Pew Research Center

Taxpayers are right to wonder: Why does a body that hasn’t done its job properly in 27 years deserve a raise?

The answer isn’t merely to restore regular order and pass bloated bills on time. Instead, Congress and DOGE should renovate government from the ground up using the Constitution as the blueprint.

No one is forcing Congress to back itself into a corner every year. If it’s too daunting to pass 12 appropriations bills on time, Congress could dramatically downsize the administrative state and consider fewer bills with a more open, transparent process so the public could understand and debate how Congress wants to spend their money. According to the Federal Register, taxpayers fund 441 agencies. If Congress capped the number of agencies at, say, 100 or 50 or 15, the work of oversight and deliberation would be much easier. Services would be streamlined and improved, transparency would be enhanced and funding cliffs would be avoided.

If this seems too hard or painful to members of Congress, or if they’re worried about the effects of a shutdown, they can stay in town as long as it takes and have an open and transparent debate. Congress could debate each controversial item (i.e. its pay raise and exemption from Obamacare) separately and hold individual votes on amendments until it finds consensus. Are disaster victims in North Carolina not worth this effort?

Taxpayers are delivering a simple message: Do your job. It’s time for a Mike Rowe approach to legislating. It’s a dirty job. Get over it. Wade into the sludge and filth and work until the work is done.

I had the pleasure of working for a member of Congress who wasn’t afraid of hard work and oversight. Twenty-five years ago, in 1999, I helped staff the only de facto legislative filibuster in the history of the House of Representatives when then-U.S. Representative Tom Coburn offered 115 amendments to the Agriculture Appropriations bill. Coburn took a stand because Congress was using farmers, and social security recipients, as human shields in their game to justify evading spending caps Congress itself just agreed to in 1997.

The big spenders of that era wagered that no one would have the backbone to obstruct a bill for “the farmers” but Coburn correctly concluded Congress was on the wrong side of the taxpayers. Coburn’s tenacity and dirty job ethos helped bring about the only real spending cuts since the end of Korean War, between 2012-2013.

No one is stopping Congress from doing its job. If one person can offer 115 amendments, ten can offer 1,150 amendments and 100 can offer 11,500 amendments. That would still allow 335 members (three-fourths of the House) to sit around and vote.

Musk’s outsider perspective isn’t the problem; it’s the solution.

John Hart is the Chief Executive Officer at Open the Books and served as the longtime Communications Director for U.S. Senator Tom Coburn.