WASHINGTON—Congress is struggling to do the bare minimum.
The House recently passed a measure reopening most of the Department of Homeland Security after a 76-day shutdown . Its passage after a monthlong logjam was hailed as a breakthrough. It wasn’t. Rather, it papered over the increasingly shaky state of Congress, with big implications for the institution and the people who run it.
“You lose majorities by overreach and dysfunction. And right now we don’t look as functional as we need to look,” said Rep. Tom Cole , an Oklahoma Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee, as Republicans struggled last week to fund DHS and renew a sweeping surveillance law.
The public perception of Congress remains near a record low, according to recent polling by Gallup, which showed 10% of voters approve of Congress and 86% disapprove—a net of minus 76 percentage points. The current GOP-controlled Congress reached a peak of 31% approval in March 2025 but saw a steep decline during last year’s record-long shutdown of the full government. Congress hasn’t been above water in more than two decades.
Two and a half years after rebel Republicans ousted their own speaker of the House, Congress is at a new nadir, marked by intense partisanship that deters dealmaking and slim majorities that empower any small group to defy party leaders. Consider the following:
“It’s just a mess. I mean, both sides, we just shake our heads at how things have gone off the deep end,” said former Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.), a onetime committee chairman who retired from Congress in 2023. “You talk to any former member, and they’re like, ‘I’m so glad we’re gone.’”
Frustration boils over
Congress has had its ups and downs for years, but the current dysfunction continues to set records, as measured by marathon votes and lengthy shutdowns. And the frustration has begun to boil over.
Republicans accuse Democrats of being obstructionist. House Republicans are furious with Senate Republicans for jamming them with bills they don’t want to pass. Senate Republicans are exasperated with House Republicans, who are splintered into factions—whether the hard-line Freedom Caucus or blue-state Republicans or pro-ethanol members from farm states—that often tussle with each other.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) heaved a sigh when asked recently how the Senate can function if the House is struggling so much. “We just do what we can,” he said.
Congress is marked by intense partisanship that deters dealmaking. Caroline Gutman for WSJ
Senate Democrats shake their heads at the thicket of bills that have become stuck in the House under Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) or have ping-ponged between the chambers. “Look, the Senate is no thing of beauty. Don’t get me wrong,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), a onetime House leader. “But what you’re seeing in the House, in addition to essentially being a rubber stamp to Donald Trump , is complete chaos.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.), a member of the Freedom Caucus, sees it differently.
“The Senate doesn’t do anything, and then they basically jam us with some BS that nobody wants to do—and they do it at the 11th hour,” he said. “So the members are beyond frustrated with the Senate.”
Donalds also said the quality of new laws is what’s important. “I don’t think the litmus test for Congress should be the amount of bills that you pass,” he said.
President Trump returned to the White House last year in full control of the House and the Senate, with Republicans hoping he could keep GOP lawmakers in line. But after Republicans passed Trump’s tax megabill last summer over objections from all Democrats, both chambers have struggled.
In recent weeks, the GOP’s majorities—53-47 in the Senate and 218-212 in the House—have faced a series of legislative hurdles, adding to anxieties ahead of November’s midterm elections. Republicans finally passed funding for DHS and got the farm bill out of the House but had to resort to another short-term extension of a mass-surveillance law.
House GOP leaders now frequently start votes without knowing the outcome—a move that used to be rare—and then leave them open to give time to pressure or cajole colleagues to get on board. Several recent votes were kept open for hours until GOP holdouts relented. The longest known votes in modern memory both occurred in July, with one held open for more than seven hours and another for more than nine hours.
Shutdown after shutdown
While the Senate largely avoids interpersonal drama, Democrats there triggered the record-long shutdown last year to block cuts to healthcare spending. They eventually backed down with little to show for it.
“We’ve normalized shutting down the government,” said former Rep. Charlie Dent (R., Pa.). “Both sides have done it now. They shut it down, saying they’re making policy demands that they believe are reasonable and the other side is unreasonable.”
House members gripe that the Senate is beholden to the filibuster rule that requires 60 votes for most legislation. The filibuster can force bipartisan cooperation. But working across the aisle has become anathema to many lawmakers, party activists and influencers. That aversion to compromise has led to gridlock and brinkmanship, pushing the country into shutdowns and toward default, over and over again.
The struggles also underscore another feature of Congress: its inability to follow its own timetable for funding the government. It has been about 30 years since Congress enacted all 12 annual government funding bills on time, before the end of the fiscal year. Even when the GOP-led Congress this past year succeeded in negotiating the details of individual spending bills in committee, Senate Democrats initially blocked those bills on the floor.
Instead, lawmakers typically lurch through ugly fights to extend current funding levels for a few weeks or months until they can negotiate “omnibus” or “minibus” spending deals that sprawl over hundreds of pages. Leaders also have tried to bundle contentious policy proposals into a single procedural vote.
An aversion to compromise has led to gridlock on Capitol Hill. Caroline Gutman for WSJ
“I just think it’s a bad idea when you cram all of that together,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) during a recent stalemate on the House floor. “Six months down the road, I’m going to be walking down the street and—‘Burchett, you voted for such and such,’ and I say, ‘No, I didn’t.’ And then I find out it’s in this humongous megabill.”
Some Republicans warn that a reckoning is coming in November if they can’t get Congress back on track.
“You can either be part of a functional majority and get almost everything you want, or you can hold out and get nothing and be in the minority next time,” said Cole. “I guess we can all get to vote ‘no’ together then—that’ll be exciting.”
