That is not a charge. It is a description, one that the movement’s most prominent leaders now largely embrace themselves. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist openly, repeatedly, and without apology.¹ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carries the same label. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told the Wall Street Journal that Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign gave him “the language to even describe my own politics as being a Democratic socialist.”² So why does much of the political media continue to call these figures progressives, as though the word were politically neutral? The answer is that the name was never neutral. It was strategic from the start.

Where the Name Came From

In the spring of 1912, a worker standing inside a Chicago meatpacking plant had no minimum wage, no protection against a 14-hour shift, and no recourse if the machines hurt him. His employer answered to no regulatory body. His alderman was on the payroll of the same corporation that ran the plant.³ When reformers looked at that America, they concluded the system was broken. They called themselves progressives. The word described a moment and a mission: moving an industrialized nation beyond the Gilded Age’s lawless extremes.

The movement drew its intellectual energy from a generation of American academics who had studied at German universities, where they absorbed ideas about active state management, centralized administration, and a theory of government that differed fundamentally from the limited-government philosophy the American Founders had built.⁴ Those ideas were not inherently socialist. But they were the intellectual ancestors of socialism’s American cousin: the belief that expert-run government, not private markets and individual liberty, should determine the shape of society.

Theodore Roosevelt gave this thinking its first dramatic national voice. His Square Deal framed government as an active referee between capital and labor, not a passive bystander.⁵ His 1912 Bull Moose campaign pushed further, calling for social insurance, labor standards, and a more direct style of democratic governance.⁶ Roosevelt was not a socialist. But he established a template that later generations would push further: that the federal government’s job was not to protect individual liberty within a constitutional framework, but to produce the outcomes that experts and reformers considered fair.

Wilson and the Philosophical Break

Woodrow Wilson went further than Roosevelt, not just in policy, but in philosophy. Wilson openly admired Bismarck’s Germany, describing its system of relatively unchecked state power as “nearly perfected” and acknowledging it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle.”⁷ What Wilson was describing was not an update to the American founding. It was a replacement for it.

The Declaration of Independence holds that rights are God-given and pre-political, meaning government cannot grant them and cannot legitimately take them away. Wilson reversed that premise entirely, arguing that liberty is “the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs,” not a natural condition but something the state manages and distributes.⁷ From that philosophical shift flowed everything: the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the income tax, and the idea that expert administrators, insulated from democratic accountability, should run the mechanisms of modern society.⁸ This was the birth of what scholars call the administrative state, the permanent, largely unelected bureaucracy that governs vast swaths of American life today.

Wilson’s legacy carried another dimension that honest history cannot ignore. He re-segregated the federal workforce, rolling back Black advancement in civil service employment.⁹ The progressive movement he led also intersected with the eugenics movement, which produced the Supreme Court’s 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell, upholding compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit.¹⁰ The movement that called itself the voice of the people simultaneously held much of the population in profound contempt.

From New Deal to Great Society: Socialism by Degrees

Wilson’s philosophy did not die when he left office. It went underground into universities, think tanks, and the Democratic Party’s policy infrastructure, waiting for the next crisis that would make the case for activist government self-evident. The Great Depression provided it.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did not invent a new ideology. It applied the Wilsonian blueprint at a scale Wilson had only theorized.¹¹ The alphabet agencies, including the SEC, the NLRB, and the Social Security Administration, institutionalized the idea that expert bureaucrats managing complex economic systems was not just acceptable but necessary. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s layered Medicare, Medicaid, federal education programs, and sweeping anti-poverty initiatives on top of that foundation.¹²

These programs produced real benefits for millions of Americans, and supporters of progressive governance rightly point to that record. But they also produced something else: a federal government that had fundamentally redefined its role from the one the Constitution described. The question of whether that redefinition was a reform or a revolution is the argument American politics has been having ever since.

The Reagan Correction and What It Did Not Fix

The 1970s exposed the limits of the progressive model. Inflation, crime, urban decline, and a general collapse of public confidence in institutions produced the Reagan era, a sustained cultural and political backlash against the idea that government expertise could solve every social problem.¹³ Reagan won by speaking directly to Americans who felt that progressive governance had become condescending, fiscally reckless, and inattentive to the disorder that ordinary people actually experienced in their daily lives.

The backlash stalled the progressive advance but did not reverse it. The New Deal and Great Society infrastructure remained largely intact. Progressive ideas retreated into universities, activist networks, and the Democratic Party’s policy offices, where a new generation was being shaped by thinkers who believed Reagan had interrupted something essential and necessary.¹⁴ What came back in the 2000s and 2010s was not the moderate progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt. It was something more explicitly ideological, more culturally assertive, and far less interested in the broad coalition politics that had made mid-twentieth century liberalism work.

Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani: Progressives Who Call Themselves Socialists

A decade after his first bid for the White House ended in failure, Bernie Sanders is still trying to take over the Democratic Party. At 84, he has done more to reshape it than any other figure of the past decade, and he is not finished.¹⁵ He speaks at least once a week with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who shocked the political establishment in 2025 by defeating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. He swore Mamdani in as mayor in January.

Sanders has assembled an email list with more than five million contacts. More than 8,500 people have expressed interest in running for office through his organization, far surpassing anything the national Democratic Party has built. During a recent nationwide rally tour, Sanders drew the biggest crowds of his career.¹⁵ His litmus test for endorsements is revealing. He asks candidates whether they will “stand up to the oligarchs,” demand that “the wealthy start paying their fair share,” and whether they believe in “healthcare as a human right and Medicare for All.”¹⁵ That is not progressive. That is socialist.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carries the same label and is now considering either a run for the White House or a primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2028.¹⁵ Sanders said of the prospect: “I’m a big fan of Alexandria’s.” In Denver, a 28-year-old Democratic socialist named Melat Kiros is mounting a surprisingly competitive challenge against a veteran 30-year congressman by running on Medicare for All and free child care.¹⁵

Mamdani told the Journal he has always seen Sanders as a political North Star, and that Sanders’s 2016 campaign gave him the language to call himself a democratic socialist.² In New York City, a population of 8.5 million people is now the test case for what that language means when it meets a $5.4 billion budget deficit.¹⁶ Wall Street has taken notice. Former Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop has stepped forward to organize business opposition to Mamdani’s proposed tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.¹⁶

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the formal legislative arm of this movement, includes nearly 100 members in the House and Senate. Its 2024 policy agenda called for Medicare for All, a federal minimum wage of $25 per hour, a Green New Deal framework, and sweeping expansions of housing and childcare programs.¹⁷ These are not fringe positions within the Democratic caucus. They are its stated platform.

Why Mainstream Democrats Are Running Scared

The Democratic establishment knows exactly what is happening. It is simply too afraid of its own activist base to say it plainly.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Democratic Party lost ground in voter registration in all 30 states that track partisan affiliation, a net swing of 4.5 million voters toward Republicans.¹⁸ Among men under 45, the share registering as Democrats fell from roughly two-thirds of new registrants in 2018 to less than half by 2024. In Pennsylvania alone, nearly twice as many registered Democrats switched to Republican between 2020 and 2025 as went the other way.¹⁸ In Miami-Dade County, once a Democratic stronghold by 200,000 voters, Republicans now hold the registration advantage.¹⁸

DNC Chairman Ken Martin reversed course in late 2025 on his pledge to publicly release a detailed review of the party’s 2024 election failures, calling the findings “a distraction” ahead of the midterms.¹⁹ His own party’s internal review reportedly found that presidential campaign messaging was “not credible for many voters,” that outreach began too late, and that Democrats had taken younger voters for granted. These are polite ways of saying the party’s left-wing brand cost it the election.

Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist group Third Way, put it directly: the voters who decide elections “don’t want an upheaval of the economy as progressives have proposed.”¹⁵ Nathan Brand, a senior adviser to the Senate Republican campaign committee, is equally direct about the electoral calculation: “Republicans would always rather run against a Bernie-backed candidate than a traditional candidate.”¹⁵ Even as these warnings pile up, the progressive machine keeps winning primaries, keeps pushing the party’s platform further left, and keeps insisting the problem is that Democrats have not gone far enough.

Schumer and Sanders “disagree on almost everything,” in Sanders’s own words.¹⁵ That is an accurate description of the state of the Democratic Party in April 2026. One side is trying to win elections in Pennsylvania and Arizona. The other is trying to build a socialist movement. Both call themselves Democrats. They are not.

The Constitutional Problem Nobody Is Talking About

The dispute between progressive governance and the American constitutional system is not just a policy argument. It is a structural conflict that the courts are now actively adjudicating. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo overturned Chevron deference, the decades-old doctrine that had given federal agencies broad latitude to interpret their own statutory authority.²⁰ That decision marked a direct judicial challenge to the administrative state’s foundational premise: that unelected experts should be trusted to expand government power beyond what Congress has explicitly authorized.

As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a speech at the University of Texas in April 2026, the progressive project from Wilson forward has represented a sustained challenge to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, specifically, the idea that rights are pre-political and that government’s role is to protect them, not to define and distribute them.⁷ That critique is not an abstraction. It describes a real and ongoing tension between what the progressive movement is trying to build and the constitutional framework within which American government is supposed to operate.

Where This Is Going, and Why 45 Percent of America Should Be Deeply Concerned

The most important political fact in the country right now is not what progressives or Republicans are doing. It is what the rest of America is doing, which is leaving.

Gallup reported in January 2026 that 45 percent of American adults now identify as political independents, an all-time high, surpassing the previous record of 43 percent set in 2014 and 2023.²¹ Republicans and Democrats each stand at just 27 percent. Among Gen Z adults, 56 percent call themselves independents. Among millennials, the figure is 54 percent.²¹

These are not disengaged voters. They are not people who have tuned out. They are people who have made a deliberate decision that neither of the two parties that currently dominate American political life represents their interests, their values, or their understanding of how a functioning government should behave. They watched the Democratic Party spend a decade lurching left toward an agenda it now struggles to distinguish from democratic socialism. They watched the Republican Party abandon principled conservatism for something else entirely. And 45 percent of them decided they were done with both.

The Democratic Party’s Gallup favorability rating stands at 34 percent, the worst the organization has recorded in the modern era.²² The voters who left the party between 2020 and 2024 did not relocate to the progressive wing. They relocated to political independence, and the polling offers no evidence they intend to return. Political analyst Lee Drutman has projected that even if Democrats win the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028, structural forces including the 2030 Census and population shifts toward red states could produce a Republican wave by 2030 and 2031 more durable than anything the party has faced in decades.²²

The 45 percent of Americans who have walked away from both parties are not waiting for a more progressive Democratic Party. They are not looking for a more energized socialist movement. They are looking for something the current system is structurally incapable of providing: a governing organization that treats them as capable adults, builds policy on facts rather than ideology, and is accountable to voters rather than to donors and activist bases.

The progressive movement is real. Its grievances about inequality and corporate power are legitimate, and its policy ambitions connect with genuine suffering in the American economy. But calling it progressive does not make it so. What it is, is a well-organized, well-funded, electorally ambitious movement that believes the American government should look substantially more like the European social democracies its founders admired a century ago. American voters, at least the 45 percent who are watching from outside both parties, deserve to have that stated plainly, so they can make an informed decision about what kind of country they want to live in.

Endnotes

1. Bernie Sanders, interview with the Wall Street Journal, as quoted in Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026. Sanders has self-identified as a democratic socialist throughout his career and reiterated the label in this interview.

2. Zohran Mamdani, quoted in Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026.

3. Centercratic Party / CenterVoter.com, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026, centercratic.party. Opening scene of Chicago meatpacking conditions drawn from this document, which in turn draws on Library of Congress primary source materials for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

4. Daniel J. Mahoney, “The Progressive Origins of the Administrative State,” Social Philosophy and Policy, Cambridge University Press, January 8, 2007; American Mind, “The German Stamp on Wilson’s Administrative Progressivism,” November 2, 2020, americanmind.org.

5. Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, “What Was the Square Deal?”, trlibrary.com; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Square Deal,” April 15, 2026.

6. Miller Center, University of Virginia, “Transforming American Democracy: TR and the Bull Moose Campaign of 1912,” February 12, 2017, millercenter.org; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Bull Moose Party,” March 18, 2026.

7. Justice Clarence Thomas, remarks at the University of Texas, Austin, April 15, 2026, published as “Justice Thomas: Progressives vs. the Declaration,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2026. Wilson quotations are drawn directly from Thomas’s speech and the primary sources he cites therein.

8. Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026, centercratic.party; Heritage Foundation, “The Birth of the Administrative State,” November 19, 2007, heritage.org.

9. Berkeley Haas News, “How Woodrow Wilson’s Racist Policies Eroded the Black Civil Service,” July 24, 2024, newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu; Equal Justice Initiative, “President Wilson Authorizes Segregation Within Federal Government,” calendar.eji.org.

10. Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026 (citing Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 1927); historical scholarship on forced sterilization in twentieth-century America.

11. Roosevelt House, Hunter College, “From FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society,” roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu; Time, “The New Deal and the Great Society: How They Were Different,” April 4, 2016.

12. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Great Society,” March 8, 2026, britannica.com.

13. Ruy Teixeira, “How Progressives Blew It,” The Free Press, October 27, 2024, thefp.com; general historical scholarship on the Reagan era and the conservative resurgence of the 1970s–1980s.

14. Hoover Institution, “Obama and the State of Progressivism, 2011,” November 30, 2010, hoover.org; Center for American Progress, “Social Movements and Progressivism,” April 13, 2010.

15. Eliza Collins, “Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2026.

16. Wall Street Journal, “Wall Street Enlists Marine Veteran Steve Fulop Against Zohran Mamdani’s Push to Raise Taxes,” 2026.

17. Congressional Progressive Caucus, “Congressional Progressive Caucus Unveils New Legislative Agenda to Deliver Equality, Justice, and Economic Security,” April 17, 2024; Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026.

18. Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith, “The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis,” New York Times, August 20, 2025; Centercratic Party, “Progressivism: Past, Present & Future,” 2026 (citing L2 voter registration data).

19. John McCormick, “Democratic Party Flip-Flops on Releasing Review of 2024 Election Failures,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2025.

20. DLA Piper, “Chevron Overruled: In Loper Bright v. Raimondo,” June 2024, dlapiper.com; K&L Gates, “The End of Chevron Deference,” June 27, 2024, klgates.com.

21. Gallup, “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents,” January 12, 2026.

22. Lee Drutman, “The Democratic Party Is About to Make the Most Predictable Mistake in American Politics,” Undercurrent Events, March 23, 2026; Gallup, January 2026 report (cited in Drutman).

Webb’s story is not unusual. It is, in fact, entirely predictable. Not because of some last-minute political decision, but because someone wrote it down two years earlier, in a 920-page document called Project 2025, and meant every word of it.

Here is what most Americans do not yet understand: Project 2025 was not a wish list. It was a construction plan. And as of this week, independent trackers confirm that between 51 and 53 percent of its proposals have been initiated or completed, representing the fastest restructuring of the federal government in modern American history. The debate happening in Washington right now is mostly about the half that has not yet been done. The half that is already done barely gets mentioned.

The Disavowal That Wasn’t

When reporters first pressed Donald Trump about Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, his answer was consistent: he had never read it, had nothing to do with it, and disagreed with some of its ideas. The Heritage Foundation, sensing that the document had become a political liability, removed its director in August 2024 and publicly distanced itself from the project.

The document itself never went anywhere. Published in April 2023, it had been drafted by more than 400 conservative scholars and former government officials from over 100 organizations. Its core argument was straightforward: a second Trump term would have a four-year window to fundamentally restructure the executive branch, and if that window was not used aggressively from the very first day, it would be wasted. The document described, chapter by chapter, exactly how to use it.

In Trump’s first week back in office, more than two-thirds of his executive actions tracked directly to Project 2025 proposals. The administration signed more than 225 executive orders in 2025 alone, a volume unmatched in modern presidential history.¹ The disavowal had been a campaign strategy. The document had been a governing one.

As you can see from the chart below, 9 of the 13 policy domains are either fully complete or well underway.

What They Actually Built

The most complete implementation is the one that received the least sustained public attention. On March 8, 2026, a federal rule known as Schedule Policy/Career took full effect. It stripped civil service protections from approximately 50,000 federal employees, converting them to at-will workers who can be fired for what the rule calls ‘subversion of presidential directives,’ with no right to appeal to an independent watchdog. More than 260,000 federal workers left government service in 2025 through layoffs, forced retirements, and resignations, representing roughly 9 percent of the entire civilian federal workforce.² That is not a reorganization. It is a generational transformation of how the government operates.

USAID is gone. The agency that delivered humanitarian aid to more than 100 countries, managed more than $120 billion in contracts at the start of 2025, and employed thousands of Americans like Marcus Webb was formally shuttered on July 1, 2025. A Lancet study estimated the funding cuts could contribute to 14 million additional deaths worldwide, including 4.5 million children. The FBI now occupies USAID’s former headquarters in Washington.³ Rebuilding that agency would require an act of Congress, years of institutional reconstruction, and a level of political will that has rarely existed in Washington under any party.

More than 8,000 federal web pages and 3,000 government datasets have been removed from public access, including nearly all climate science resources maintained by federal agencies.⁴ All 400 scientists working on the congressionally mandated 2027 National Climate Assessment were dismissed. The entire climate.gov staff was let go on May 31, 2025. Those scientists are not returning. Those datasets are not being rebuilt. This is what the word ‘permanent’ means when applied to government action.

The chart below details the status of the nine active policy domains.

What the Courts Have to Say

The administration has not had everything go its way. By March 31, 2025, 152 lawsuits had been filed to block Project 2025-aligned executive actions, and the administration lost approximately 93 percent of those early cases.⁵ Courts have blocked funding cutoffs to sanctuary cities, reinstated employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after DOGE shut it down, and issued injunctions against multiple immigration enforcement tactics.

The legal picture is now converging on the Supreme Court, where two cases expected to be decided by July 2026 could determine the trajectory of everything still on the Project 2025 agenda. One involves birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment that the administration has tried to limit by executive order. The other is a broader challenge about how much direct control a president can exercise over independent federal agencies, a legal theory known as the unitary executive doctrine. If the Court rules in the administration’s favor on that second case, many of the proposals that courts have blocked could move forward without any need for Congress to act.

The Half That Hasn’t Happened Yet

The 48 percent of Project 2025 that remains unimplemented is concentrated in proposals that require legislation. A two-tiered flat income tax replacing the current progressive system has not been introduced. The statutory abolition of the Department of Education, which requires a 60-vote Senate supermajority, has not advanced beyond executive hollowing-out. The Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that Project 2025 proposed using to ban the mailing of contraception and abortion medication nationwide, has not been enforced in that way. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage companies that Project 2025 wants privatized, remain under federal control.

These proposals hit a wall that Project 2025’s authors acknowledged but perhaps underestimated: Congress. Republicans hold a 218-214 majority in the House, meaning a single defection on any party-line vote can kill legislation. The Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a procedural delay called a filibuster on most bills, and Republicans do not have them. The entire Congress passed just 64 bills in all of 2025, a 93 percent drop from mid-20th-century legislative productivity.⁶ The legislative half of Project 2025 is waiting for a Congress that does not yet exist.

The Plan That Dares Not Speak Its Name

There is one detail about Project 2025 that its own architects find embarrassing. In polling conducted in late 2025, the name “Project 2025” registered just 7 percent favorable among Republican voters, despite the fact that its policies were being actively implemented by a Republican administration. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts responded the way any organization would respond to a branding problem: he changed the name. At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference in December 2025, Roberts unveiled Heritage 2.0, built around four new pillars: The American Family, The Dignity of Work, National Security, and American Heritage and Citizenship. The policy agenda behind those pillars is identical to the document the administration spent the campaign denying it had ever read.⁷

Roberts was not alone in the room, but he was increasingly alone in the movement. More than 60 senior Heritage figures, including trustees and scholars who had co-written Project 2025, resigned by January 2026. Legal scholar Robert P. George departed. Staff member Josh Blackman wrote that he was leaving because of what he called a rising tide of antisemitism on the right. National Review published a piece under the headline: ‘The Heritage Foundation Implodes.’⁸ The institution that built the blueprint was fracturing even as the blueprint was being built out.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

The conversation in Washington, and in most American living rooms, treats Project 2025 as a future threat, something that could happen if the right elections go the wrong way. That conversation is 15 months out of date. The more consequential question is not what Project 2025 might still do. It is what has already been done, what cannot be undone, and whether the American public understands the difference.

USAID requires an act of Congress to rebuild. The 260,000 federal workers who left government service took decades of institutional knowledge with them that no hiring freeze reversal can restore. The climate scientists dismissed from the National Climate Assessment are working elsewhere. The deleted datasets are gone. These are not policy positions that change with the next election. They are structural changes to how the country functions, and they were executed with a speed and completeness that most Americans never saw coming, because for most of the campaign, both the candidate and the document denied they had anything to do with each other.

Marcus Webb has moved on. He teaches now, at a community college in northern Virginia, training the next generation of public administrators in the theory of government service. He told a former colleague recently that he hopes his students never have to learn the harder lesson he learned: that the most consequential decisions a government makes are often the ones it makes before anyone realizes they are decisions at all.

Shouldn’t We in the Center Be Alarmed?

What Project 2025 proved, above all else, is that a determined political movement with a detailed plan and a four-year window can reshape the architecture of American government faster than most citizens can follow. That is not a partisan observation. It is a structural warning.

The conservative movement built its blueprint in the open, and the country largely missed it until the construction was half finished. There is no reason a future movement from the left could not do exactly the same, using the same tools, the same executive power, and the same speed, in the opposite direction.

In our next article, we will show you exactly what that looks like, walking through a progressive mirror image of Project 2025 proposal by proposal, so you can judge for yourself whether the threat to the center comes from only one direction.

What America is watching right now is not just a conservative project. It is a demonstration of what happens when ideological extremes replace governing with engineering. The antidote is not a counter-blueprint from the other side. It is the kind of steady, accountable, moderate governance that puts the country’s institutions ahead of any party’s agenda, and that begins with an electorate willing to demand it.

That is precisely the ground the Centercratic Party was built to hold.

Sources

1. Federal Register, Presidential Documents, Executive Orders, Donald Trump 2025. federalregister[dot]gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders/donald-trump/2025. CNN analysis: over two-thirds of first-week actions mirror Project 2025. morolawyers[dot]com/post/project-2025-implementation-under-president-trump-status-as-of-march-1-2025

2. Schedule Policy/Career final rule, NPR, February 6, 2026. npr[dot]org/2026/02/06/nx-s1-5704171/trump-fire-federal-employees-schedule-f. Federal workforce departures: ABC News, 2025. abcnews[dot]com/US/wireStory/year-after-trumps-doge-cuts-workers-lives-upended-131464633

3. USAID official closure, NPR, July 1, 2025. npr[dot]org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5451372/usaid-officially-shuts-down-and-merges-remaining-operations-with-state-department. Lancet study estimates. DonorTracker. donortracker[dot]org/policy_updates?policy=us-government-announces-official-closure-of-usaid-2025

4. Federal web pages and datasets removed, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia[dot]org/wiki/2025_United_States_government_online_resource_removals. Climate scientists dismissed: Center for Western Priorities. westernpriorities[dot]org/2026/01/from-disavowal-to-delivery

5. 152 lawsuits filed by March 31, 2025. Fullerton Observer. fullertonobserver[dot]com/2025/03/31/doge-trump-project-2025-blocked-by-152-lawsuits-in-just-three-months

6. 64 bills enacted in 2025. GovTrack / Congress[dot]gov. GOP House majority 218-214: Associated Press, January 2025.

7. Project 2025 polls at 7% favorable among Republicans; Heritage 2.0 launched December 2025. The Independent. independent[dot]co[dot]uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-project-2026-heritage-foundation-b2894824.html

8. 60+ Heritage resignations: Washington Informer. washingtoninformer[dot]com/heritage-foundation-resigns-project2025. ‘The Heritage Foundation Implodes’: National Review, via The Advocate. advocate[dot]com/politics/project-2025-continues-into-2026

How We Lost the Center

In 1997, the Cook Political Report published its first Partisan Voting Index, a tool designed to measure how every congressional district in the country leans relative to the national average. That year, 164 House districts fell in the swing range of D+5 to R+5. Those 164 seats were the center of American politics. They were the districts where elections were actually decided by persuasion, where candidates had to earn votes from both sides, and where the outcome on Election Day was genuinely uncertain.1

That center has been collapsing ever since. By 2017, the number of swing districts had fallen to just 72, a 56 percent decline in two decades. A modest recovery brought the count back to 97 by 2025, driven partly by redistricting reform in states like California, Michigan, and Colorado. But even at 97, the swing seat count sits 41 percent below where it started.2

The decline of crossover voting tells the same story from a different angle. In 1996, there were 115 congressional districts where voters chose a presidential candidate from one party and a House member from the other. By 2024, that number had dropped to 16. That is an 86 percent decline. The American voter who splits a ticket, who judges candidates on their merits rather than their party label, has become nearly extinct.3

The causes are well documented. The Cook Political Report found that roughly 83 percent of the swing seat decline resulted from natural geographic self-sorting, Americans clustering into communities of like-minded neighbors, while only about 17 percent came from deliberate gerrymandering.4 But gerrymandering amplified the damage. When partisan mapmakers in states like Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina draw boundaries, they transform districts that might otherwise be competitive into safe seats. The mid-decade redistricting cycle that began in 2025 further reduced the competitive zone.5

The result is a House of Representatives where the typical Democrat and the typical Republican represent constituencies that are dramatically more partisan than they were a generation ago. In 1997, the median Democratic-held seat had a Cook PVI of D+7, and the median Republican-held seat had a PVI of R+7, a 14-point gap. By 2017, those figures had shifted to D+14 and R+11, a 25-point gap. Members in those kinds of districts have no electoral incentive to compromise with the other side, and most of them do not.6

The 36-Seat Election

The Cook Political Report’s March 2026 ratings break the 435-seat House into tiers. There are 174 Solid Democratic seats and 183 Solid Republican seats. There are 19 Likely Democratic seats and 8 Likely Republican seats, categories that resolve in the favored party’s direction more than 97 percent of the time. Then there are 16 Lean Democratic, 16 Lean Republican, and 19 Toss Up seats.7

Add it up, and only 36 seats qualify as genuinely competitive. Thirty-two states have zero competitive races. David Wasserman, senior elections analyst for Cook, put it this way in February: “Currently, we only classify 18 out of 435 races as toss-ups, indicating that fewer than 5 percent of Americans will genuinely influence who controls the House.”8 FairVote’s Monopoly Politics 2026 report projects that 81 percent of House seats are already safe for one party, with outcomes effectively decided in primary elections rather than general elections.9

To understand what that means in practice, consider five scenarios for November, ranging from a Republican wave to a Democratic wave. Across all five, the total range of outcomes is just 51 seats. Democrats could win as few as 195 seats in a Republican landslide or as many as 246 in a Democratic surge. The median outcome, based on current forecasting consensus, points to approximately 218 Democratic seats, the barest possible majority.10

Here is the historical context that makes those numbers remarkable. The 1994 Republican Revolution produced a 54-seat swing. The 2010 Tea Party wave produced a 63-seat swing. Neither of those outcomes would be structurally possible in 2026, because there simply are not enough competitive seats for that kind of movement. The era of the wave election, the kind that produces genuine mandates and realigns the balance of power, is over. It did not end because voters stopped caring. It ended because the playing field was engineered to prevent it.

The Leverage No One Is Talking About

There is a structural consequence of the narrowing battlefield that almost no one in Washington is talking about, and it is the most important finding in this analysis. As the number of competitive seats shrinks, the leverage of a small centrist bloc grows in direct proportion.

Think of it this way. When 90 or 100 House seats were competitive, as they were in 2006 or 2010, the majority party could afford internal dissent. A bloc of 3 or 5 members refusing to vote with their party was a nuisance, not a crisis. The majority had a cushion of dozens of seats. But when only 36 seats are competitive and the likely majority margin is between 1 and 5 seats, those same 3 to 5 members become the most powerful people in the chamber. They hold the deciding votes on every piece of legislation.

The current Congress has already demonstrated this dynamic. Republicans hold a 219 to 212 majority with 4 vacancies. That margin is so thin that a handful of defections can block any bill, and they have, repeatedly. The next Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, will face the same arithmetic. A majority of 218 to 217, which is the median forecast, means that a single member can bring the legislative process to a halt, and a bloc of 3 to 5 centrist members could force both parties to the negotiating table on every major vote.11

This is the inverse curve. As competitive seats decrease, the strategic value of each one increases. As the majority margin shrinks, the power of a disciplined swing bloc grows exponentially. The structural forces that created polarization and gridlock have simultaneously created the conditions under which a small, strategically placed centrist group would wield outsized influence over the legislative process.

A System That Needs a Structural Answer

The story told by three decades of data is not complicated. The two major parties, through a combination of geographic sorting, gerrymandering, and the nationalization of politics, have engineered a House of Representatives where over 86 percent of seats are decided before the general election even takes place. The competitive battlefield has shrunk by more than 40 percent in a single generation. Crossover voting has nearly vanished. And the elections that remain are fought over such a small number of seats that the outcomes are structurally compressed into a narrow band that guarantees continued gridlock regardless of which party wins.

This is not a system that an election can fix. Electing more Democrats will not fix it. Electing more Republicans will not fix it. The structural reality is that neither party can win a large enough majority to govern effectively, and neither party has demonstrated the ability to compromise across the aisle when they hold a narrow one.

What the system needs is a structural alternative. Not a third party that tries to win 218 seats. Not a protest movement that elects a handful of members and then watches them get absorbed into one of the two caucuses. What it needs is a disciplined, strategically placed centrist bloc that targets the handful of genuinely competitive districts where a moderate candidate can win, and then uses that small group of seats to break the legislative deadlock by demanding that both parties negotiate in order to pass anything at all.

That is the purpose the Centercratic Party was built to serve. Not to replace the two major parties, but to force them to work together in a system they have designed to prevent exactly that. The data shows it can work. The arithmetic of a closely divided House, where the majority margin may be 1 to 5 seats, makes it not just possible but practical. The 36 competitive seats identified in the Cook ratings are the universe of opportunity. Within that universe, a targeted strategy focused on 5 to 10 carefully chosen districts is all it would take to change the way Congress operates.12

The narrowing of the battlefield is not something to fear. It is something to use. The same forces that created the problem have, by accident, created the opening for a solution. The question is whether anyone is willing to walk through it.

◆

References

It is now 2026.

Ask yourself: why are your elected officials still talking about this?

The basic facts are not in dispute. Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. He was convicted. He’s dead. His exploitation of over a thousand young women is one of the most horrific crime stories in modern American history. Nobody—left, right, or center—defends what he did.

But Epstein didn’t become a seven-year national saga because of the severity of his crimes. He became one because he cultivated friendships with the rich and famous across politics, business, and entertainment. Had he been an anonymous predator, his case would have cycled off the front page in weeks. Instead, Congress has spent the better part of a year turning the Epstein files into a political spectacle and the Epstein saga has become the most expensive supermarket tabloid in American history.

You are paying the price.

A Timeline of Absurdity

Let’s walk through what your elected officials have actually been doing with your time and money.

The Republican play: President Trump resisted releasing the Epstein files for months. In July 2025, he dismissed the entire matter as “pretty boring stuff.” His administration called signing the discharge petition to force a vote “a very hostile act.” Then, when it became clear that enough Republicans were breaking ranks to force the issue, and that blocking the files was becoming a political liability, he suddenly reversed course, urging Republicans to “vote to disclose the Epstein files, as we have nothing to conceal, and it’s time to move past this Democrat Hoax.” The House voted 427-1.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee under Chairman James Comer pursued subpoenas and contempt charges against Bill and Hillary Clinton, even as the administration blew past its own statutory deadline for releasing DOJ files by over a month. Attorney General Pam Bondi directed DOJ to seek damaging information on Clinton and Democrats despite the department having previously concluded no further investigation was warranted.

The Democrat play: House Democrats celebrated the file release as “a rare win for the minority”, framing a child sex trafficking case as a political victory. Nine Democrats on the Oversight Committee broke ranks to vote in favor of holding Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress. Three voted the same on Hillary Clinton. Party leadership was furious, not over principle, but over optics. Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the contempt proceedings “a charade,” while Democrats immediately announced plans to use the precedent to subpoena Trump when they regain control of the House. Read that again. Both parties watched the same proceeding. Republicans saw an opportunity to interrogate their political rivals under oath. Democrats saw a future weapon to use against their political rival. Neither party saw the victims.

Over 3.5 million pages of documents have been released. Congress has spent months on hearings, contempt votes, and procedural battles. Name one thing that has been solved for the victims. Name one systemic reform that has resulted. You can’t because there isn’t one.

What’s NOT Getting Done

Here’s where this story stops being about Epstein and starts being about you.

When even Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of President Trump’s fiercest allies, publicly breaks with the White House to say “The five-alarm fire is health care and affordability for Americans. And that’s where the focus should be”, something has gone spectacularly wrong. Greene was so disgusted with Congress’s misdirected priorities that she resigned from office in January 2026.

While Congress plays tabloid detective, real crises gather dust:

• Healthcare affordability: ACA subsidies have expired. Premiums are climbing. No legislative solution is on the table.

• Infrastructure: Roads, bridges, and water systems continue to crumble. In Colorado, Trump vetoed a bipartisan pipeline bill that would have delivered clean water to rural towns whose taps run brown; communities that voted for him.

• The national debt: Over $36 trillion and climbing. No serious conversation happening anywhere on Capitol Hill.

• Social Security: The trust fund is projected to be insolvent by 2034. Without action, every beneficiary faces a 19% cut in benefits. Congress is doing nothing.

• Housing: The affordability crisis deepens each month, especially for young families locked out of the market entirely.

Here’s what makes this infuriating: Congress passed only 64 laws in 2025, a 93% decline from legislative output in the 1950s. This was already one of the most historically unproductive bodies in American history. The president signed 225 executive orders in 2025, compared to those 64 laws. More executive orders in a single year than in all four years of his first term.

And now this institution is spending its scarce remaining bandwidth on… what, exactly? Videotaped depositions of a former president about a dead man?

Is the Epstein case a core systemic problem that demands a congressional solution? No. Is there legislation to write? No. Is there a policy outcome that will improve a single American’s life? No. This is political theater, pure and simple, and both parties know it.

Why Both Parties Love This Game

If both parties know it’s theater, why won’t either one stop?

Because the incentive structure makes it irresistible.

It’s cheap outrage. Epstein is a universally hated figure. No politician risks anything by expressing outrage about a dead pedophile. Unlike healthcare or immigration, there’s no policy tradeoff, no constituent backlash, no hard vote. It’s moral posturing at zero cost.

It’s weaponized mud. Each party slings connections to the other side’s elites—Clinton for Democrats, Trump for Republicans—without having to propose or defend a single policy. It’s opposition research disguised as oversight.

It feeds the media machine. Every Epstein hearing generates clicks, ratings, cable news segments, and social media engagement. Members of Congress who land TV time on this story get donor attention, name recognition, and followers. The incentive is to perform, not to govern.

It avoids accountability. Every hour spent on Epstein is an hour not spent on healthcare, infrastructure, debt, Social Security, or housing, problems where Congress might actually have to take a difficult position, cast a hard vote, or face consequences for failure. Epstein is the ultimate avoidance mechanism.

This is what happens when both parties abandon governance for performance. Americans aren’t exhausted by the Epstein files. They’re exhausted by a political class that would rather play detective than do its job.

What Real Governance Looks Like

The Centercratic Party’s first principle is Debate with Facts and Dignity. Dignity means refusing to turn the victimization of young women into a partisan point-scoring exercise. Facts mean acknowledging that this case, however horrific, does not require congressional bandwidth. It requires the justice system.

The seventh principle, Govern with a Balanced Approach, includes a specific directive: “Measure results, end what fails, and follow fiscal guardrails that limit waste.” Apply that standard to the Epstein circus. What is the measurable result? What problem is being solved? What are taxpayers getting for months of hearings? The answer is nothing. A Centercratic legislator would ask those questions before spending a single committee hour on this.

Congress has roughly 250 working days per year. Every day spent on Epstein theater is a day stolen from healthcare, infrastructure, debt, Social Security, and every other crisis that actually requires legislation. A party that takes governance seriously, that measures its own performance by outcomes and not headlines, simply wouldn’t allow this.

There is one legitimate angle here: if the Epstein case reveals systemic failures in how the justice system handles sex trafficking of minors, that is a policy conversation worth having. But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is a mud fight between two parties using a dead man’s documents as ammunition.

Who Is This Actually For?

Somewhere right now, the young women Epstein exploited are watching their trauma be weaponized by politicians who will never meet them, never help them, and never pass a single law to prevent what happened to them from happening to someone else.

Does that make you angry? It should. Not at Epstein because he’s gone. Not at Clinton or Trump because the justice system will handle whatever it handles. Be angry at a political system that has so completely lost its way that it treats a pedophile’s contact list as its highest legislative priority while Social Security marches toward insolvency and families can’t afford a doctor’s visit.

The Centercratic Party exists because millions of Americans are done watching this show. Governance means solving problems, not performing outrage.

Congress’s time belongs to you and right now, both parties are stealing it.

The Centercratic Party is building a movement for Americans who believe in solutions over slogans, evidence over ideology, and unity over division. Learn more at centercratic.party

House Speaker Mike Johnson promises the House will vote by Tuesday to reopen the government. Senate leaders trade blame. Democrats demand immigration enforcement reforms after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. Republicans accuse Democrats of holding the government hostage over partisan priorities. The script is familiar because we’ve seen it before, twenty-one times since 1976, to be exact.

But this isn’t just another shutdown. This is the second shutdown in four months, following the record-breaking 43-day closure from October 1 through November 12, 2025. That shutdown, the longest in American history, cost the U.S. economy $11 billion in lost GDP and delayed $54 billion in federal spending. It furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers, disrupted air travel, threatened SNAP benefits, and paralyzed government operations for six weeks.

And now, barely two months later, we’re right back in the same crisis.

The question isn’t what caused this particular shutdown. The question is why shutdowns have become America’s new normal and what that reveals about a two-party system that no longer functions.

Shutdowns: From Rare to Routine

Government shutdowns were not supposed to be normal.

Before 1980, when Congress missed funding deadlines, agencies simply continued operating with the assumption that lawmakers would quickly resolve the gap. But in 1980 and 1981, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued legal opinions declaring that agencies lacked authority to spend money without congressional appropriation. Suddenly, funding gaps triggered actual shutdowns.

What followed was a slow, steady descent into dysfunction:

• 1981-1990: Eight shutdowns during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, most lasting only 1-3 days.

• 1995-1996: Two shutdowns totaling 26 days during the Clinton administration, as Republicans and Democrats battled over spending levels.

• 2013: A 16-day shutdown over Affordable Care Act funding, the first major shutdown in nearly two decades.

• 2018-2019: A 35-day partial shutdown—then the longest in history—over border wall funding.

• 2025: A 43-day shutdown over healthcare subsidies, shattering all previous records.

• 2026: Another partial shutdown, this time over immigration enforcement and DHS funding.

Look at the pattern: shutdowns used to be measured in hours or days. Now they’re measured in weeks. What was once a rare procedural accident has become a recurring weapon in partisan warfare.

The Congressional Research Service notes that continuing resolutions, temporary funding measures that were supposed to be emergency stopgaps, have now become standard legislative practice. Congress no longer passes regular budgets. It lurches from crisis to crisis, using the threat of shutdown as a negotiating tool.

This isn’t governing. This is hostage-taking with a 343-million-person hostage pool.

It’s The Two-Party Déjà Vu Dance

Here’s what will happen after this shutdown ends: Democrats will blame Republicans for chaos and dysfunction. Republicans will blame Democrats for unreasonable demands and partisan obstruction. Both sides will claim victory when the government finally reopens. Cable news will move on to the next crisis.

And in six months, or a year, we’ll do it all over again.

Why? Because the shutdown cycle isn’t a bug, it’s the inevitable outcome when both political parties abandon the center and migrate to their ideological extremes.

This wasn’t a structural problem. It was a choice. And it’s getting worse.

Money is the Big Divide

This wasn’t always the case. Up until the late 1960s, American political parties were genuine coalitions. Local Democratic and Republican clubs recruited candidates from their neighborhoods. Party leadership came from the political middle, where consensus could be built. Moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats controlled the process, and legislation happened through negotiation.

Then special interest money changed everything.

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating dramatically after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, unlimited money poured into politics, but not to support centrists and consensus-builders. Wealthy donors and ideological foundations funded their allies: immigration hardliners on the right, climate absolutists on the left, anti-tax billionaires funding Republicans, maximum-government advocates funding Democrats.

These donors didn’t want compromise. They wanted total victory on their single issue. They demanded ideological purity, not bipartisan pragmatism. The result: Both parties migrated toward their extremes simultaneously, abandoning the center where Congress used to operate.

This movement to the extremes created a cascade of dysfunctions:

• Polarization: When both parties abandoned the center, they stopped viewing each other as loyal opponents and started viewing each other as existential threats. Compromise became politically impossible.

• Primary warfare: Donors poured money into primary challenges against centrist incumbents. Candidates learned that ideological purity, not problem-solving, was rewarded with funding. The center became a graveyard of primary defeats.

• Procedural weaponization: The filibuster, once rare, became routine. Not because procedures changed, but because the underlying positions became irreconcilable. You can’t compromise between maximum government control and zero regulation.

• Presidential power expansion: As Congress became paralyzed, presidents from both parties filled the void with executive orders. They didn’t choose to govern unilaterally, Congress simply couldn’t legislate anymore.

The outcome is what we see today: a Congress that has become institutionally incapable of basic governance, regardless of which party holds the majority.

Crisis is Now Routine

Here’s the pattern most Americans don’t see: Government shutdowns aren’t just happening more often. They’re lasting longer, costing more, and doing permanent damage to federal capacity.

The data reveals an acceleration:

Table: Government Shutdown Frequency and Duration

Each shutdown causes three types of damage:

Immediate economic losses: The 2018-2019 shutdown caused $3 billion in permanent GDP losses. The 2025 shutdown cost $11 billion in lost economic output. These aren’t theoretical numbers, they represent real contracts canceled, real projects delayed, real economic activity that simply never happened.

Federal workforce exodus: Research from American University found that the 2018-2019 shutdown increased federal employee voluntary separations by 19 percent, with quit rates rising 17 percent. The 2025 shutdown accelerated that trend. Longer-tenured employees, the institutional knowledge holders, started leaving at unprecedented rates, recognizing that shutdown-induced chaos had become a permanent feature of federal employment. When you systematically drive talented people out of government through repeated manufactured crises, you don’t just lose productivity in the moment. You lose institutional capacity for years to come.

Institutional capacity erosion: When talented people flee government service, you don’t just lose their current productivity. You lose decades of accumulated expertise. Federal agencies become less capable of executing even basic functions, which creates a feedback loop: dysfunction drives out talent, which increases dysfunction, which drives out more talent.

This acceleration isn’t random. It tracks precisely with the parties’ migration to their extremes. As the distance between them grows, shutdowns last longer because there’s less common ground to negotiate from.

Both Parties Love the Chaos

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about government shutdowns: Both parties have discovered they can benefit from dysfunction, which removes any incentive to prevent the next one.

For Republicans, shutdowns advance a long-term goal: demonstrating that government doesn’t work. When federal agencies shut down and the sky doesn’t immediately fall, it reinforces the narrative that government is bloated and unnecessary. Talented federal workers fleeing the system? That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. A smaller, less capable federal government is exactly what the anti-government wing wants.

For Democrats, shutdowns provide perfect political theater. Republicans always get blamed more heavily by voters. Shutdowns generate sympathetic stories about furloughed workers, delayed benefits, and economic damage. Every shutdown becomes a fundraising opportunity and campaign ammunition: “See what happens when you elect Republicans?”

For both parties’ extreme wings, shutdowns are ideological purity tests. Centrist members who try to negotiate get primaried by ideological purists with deep-pocketed donors. The Tea Party revolutionaries who shut down government in 2013 became heroes to their base. Progressive firebrands who refuse to compromise become social media superstars with millions of followers.

This creates a perverse incentive structure: The members most likely to cause shutdowns face no political consequences within their own parties. They face rewards.

That’s why the shutdown cycle won’t end by itself. The parties have moved so far to their extremes that their activist bases want confrontation more than they want governance. Political scientists call this “affective polarization”, when voters’ emotional hostility toward the other side overwhelms their interest in policy outcomes.

Members of Congress know many of their loyal voters would rather see the government shut down than watch their representative “sell out” by negotiating with the enemy. So they don’t negotiate. They posture, they grandstand, and they wait for the other side to blink first.

And every funding deadline becomes another hostage crisis.

The Centercratic Alternative

The question facing Americans right now isn’t whether this particular shutdown will end. Of course it will. Speaker Johnson will wrangle enough votes, some compromise will emerge, the government will reopen, and both parties will declare victory.

The question is whether we’re ready to break the cycle.

Because here’s what will happen if we don’t: In six months, or a year, there will be another funding deadline. One party will make demands the other refuses to accept. Procedural brinkmanship will escalate. Cable news will cover the countdown to midnight. And once again, the government will shut down, costing billions of dollars, driving talented workers out of public service, and demonstrating to the world that American democracy is broken.

The two-party system cannot fix this problem, because the two-party system is the problem. Both parties are now captured by their ideological extremes. Both punish members who compromise. Both have abandoned the 60 percent of Americans who live in the political center. And both benefit, in different ways, from the chaos: Republicans get to shrink government through attrition, Democrats get to paint Republicans as irresponsible, and neither has to actually govern.

This shutdown isn’t just a political spat; it’s a symptom of systemic failure. And that failure will continue, shutdown after shutdown, crisis after crisis, until we change the structure that creates it.

There is another way.

A genuine third party, a centrist force representing the millions of Americans abandoned by both extremes, would fundamentally change the math. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But it would change the math.

The Centercratic Party exists because we believe Americans are ready. Ready for politics grounded in facts instead of feelings. Ready for leadership that respects intelligence instead of manipulating emotions. Ready for a vision of America that brings us together instead of tearing us apart.

The system is broken, and the two parties are content to leave it that way.

We can accept the dysfunction, or we can finally build the alternative.

The Monday Breakdown is investigative journalism about government failures that mainstream media misses or ignores. We dig into auditor reports, inspector general findings, and data that reveals what’s actually happening in our institutions.

Here’s how fast it happened.

The Spark: December 2025

A YouTuber posts a viral video exposing Minnesota’s $9 billion social services fraud scandal. Elon Musk amplifies it. VP J.D. Vance amplifies it. Attorney General Pam Bondi amplifies it. Suddenly, years of fraud investigations become a national political firestorm. Somali daycare centers billing for meals never served. Housing programs riddled with phantom beneficiaries. $1 billion stolen from pandemic relief funds.

Governor Tim Walz, fresh off losing as Kamala Harris’s running mate, is under siege. House Oversight Chairman James Comer launches an investigation. Trump threatens to cut off Minnesota’s federal funding.

January 5: Walz drops out of his re-election campaign, citing the need to “protect Minnesotans from criminals who exploit our generosity”. Behind closed doors, he’s reportedly devastated, pushed out by his own party.

The Invasion: January 6-24

The Trump administration announces the “largest immigration enforcement operation ever”, sending 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minneapolis.

What happens next is chaos:

• January 7: ICE agent shoots and kills Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, on a Minneapolis street

• January 14: Federal agents shoot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis (non-fatal)

• January 16: ICE detains airport workers who passed federal background checks

• January 18: Agents enter a U.S. citizen’s home without a warrant, handcuff him, drag him outside in his underwear in freezing temperatures, detain him for two hours, searching for someone who’s been in prison since 2024.

• January 23: Massive general strike. 50,000+ protesters in -20°F weather demand ICE leave

• January 24: Border Patrol agents shoot and kill Alex Pretti, a VA hospital ICU nurse and U.S. citizen

The Implosion: January 25-27

A Republican quits his own party.

Chris Madel, GOP gubernatorial candidate and the lawyer who helped the ICE agent in the Good shooting get legal representation, drops out of the race Monday.

“I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” Madel says in an 11-minute video. “Nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so”. He calls the ICE operation an “unmitigated disaster”.

When your own party’s candidate defends the ICE agent and still quits because the operation is so bad, that’s not spin. That’s catastrophe.

Democrats smell blood.

By Tuesday, 162 House Democrats, three-quarters of the caucus, sign on to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The top three Democratic leaders (Jeffries, Clark, Aguilar) issue an ultimatum: “Kristi Noem should be fired immediately, or we will commence impeachment proceedings”.

Republicans call it theater.

“This is a partisan stunt,” House Republicans fire back, accusing Democrats of “failing to reach across the aisle” and engaging in a “messaging exercise”.

Meanwhile, Back in Washington…

The government is about to shut down. Again.

Friday, January 30, at 12:01 a.m., half the federal government runs out of money. The House passed a funding package last week. The Senate was supposed to rubber-stamp it.
But now Senate Democrats are blocking it, demanding the DHS funding be stripped out until there’s accountability for the Minneapolis shootings.
Republicans refuse to separate the bills. “We’re not negotiating,” they say.
One senator can block the whole thing under Senate rules. The clock is ticking. Congress is on recess.

This would be the second shutdown in three months. The last one, October 1 to November 12, 2025, was the longest in modern history at 43 days.

Here’s What’s Not Happening

Let’s be clear about what’s not happening while Congress plays impeachment theater:

✗ No one’s fixing the fraud systems that let $9 billion disappear

✗ No one’s training ICE agents not to shoot U.S. citizens in urban raids

✗ No one’s addressing why Border Patrol, trained for desert enforcement, is conducting arrests in Minneapolis

✗ No one’s passing the inspector general reforms that would prevent future fraud

✗ No one’s legislating anything, Congress is on track for another record-low year after passing just 64 bills in 2025

Instead:

• Democrats want impeachment

• Republicans want vindication

• The fraud continues

• The shootings continue

• The government shuts down Friday

• And a Republican lawyer for an ICE agent is so disgusted he’s quitting his own party

Here’s The Real Story

This didn’t start in January 2026.

Minnesota’s fraud scandal has been brewing since 2019. State officials flagged it. Auditors documented it. The FBI investigated starting in 2021. A judge held the state in contempt in 2021 for moving too slowly. By 2022, it was a gubernatorial debate topic.

And nobody fixed it. Not Walz. Not the legislature. Not federal oversight. Not state auditors. Everyone saw it coming, and everyone let it happen.

The ICE operation was just as predictable.

You can’t send 3,000 agents trained for border enforcement into an urban area, arm them with military-grade weapons, give them no accountability, and not expect civilians to get shot. A former CBP chief said it plainly: Border Patrol is “untrained and unskilled for policing in urban areas”.

And now?

Democrats are impeaching Noem. Republicans are defending her. Nobody’s fixing the training. Nobody’s fixing the oversight. Nobody’s fixing the fraud systems.

Just like Mayorkas last year, Republicans impeached him, Democrats dismissed it, the border stayed broken.

The Only Question That Matters

When does Congress stop turning government failure into political ammunition and actually fix the failures?

Because right now, the answer is: Never.

The fraud will keep happening. The shootings will keep happening. The shutdowns will keep happening. And both parties will keep blaming each other while Americans, like Renee Good, like Alex Pretti, like the taxpayers who lost $9 billion, pay the price.

Friday, the government shuts down again.

And on Monday, they’ll be back to slinging mud instead of passing laws.

There’s a Way Out of This

This is what happens when two parties control 100% of the power and 0% of the accountability. Neither side has to solve problems—they just have to blame the other guy and wait for voters to pick a team.

But imagine a Congress where no single party could pass a budget, launch an impeachment, or fund an agency without building a coalition. Where Republicans, Democrats, and Centercrats had to negotiate, compromise, and actually fix the core problems facing our country instead of weaponizing them for political gain. That’s not fantasy. It’s how most democracies govern. And it’s the only way the cycle of fraud, dysfunction, and perpetual crisis ever stops repeating.

The Centercratic Party exists because Americans are done choosing between two brands of dysfunction. We’re building the team that forces both sides to work together—and we’re inviting you to join us.

The Monday Breakdown is investigative journalism about government failures that mainstream media misses or ignores. We dig into auditor reports, inspector general findings, and data that reveals what’s actually happening in our institutions.

The data they presented is damning: 362 roll call votes, only 64 bills enacted into law, a chamber paralyzed by gridlock even while Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and presidency.

They told an important part of the story. But it’s only the tip of a much larger crisis: the systematic decline of American legislative power over seventy years.

This isn’t a story about 2025. This is a story about what happens when an institution loses its purpose, one year at a time, over decades.

The Seven-Decade Collapse: A Historical Reckoning

Let’s start with what the data actually shows.

In 1965, during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Congress, the House introduced nearly 20,000 bills.^[2] The Senate operated at full capacity, passing thousands of bills into law. Legislators were busy, often arguing fiercely about the direction of the country, but they were legislating. They were solving problems. They were passing laws.

By 2025, the House introduced fewer than 10,000 bills, half the volume of a half-century ago. The Senate, despite introducing a record number of bills (5,428), passed only 490.^[1] Sixty-four bills became law. That’s it. In a year when one party controlled everything.

Let that sink in.

In the early 1950s, Congress passed roughly 900 bills into law per Congress. By 2025, that number had collapsed to 64. That represents a 93 percent decline in legislative capacity over seventy years.

This isn’t cyclical. This isn’t an anomaly. This is a pattern that has been unfolding since the 1970s, accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, and now approaching complete institutional failure. Congress went from enacting 900+ laws per Congress in the 1950s to just 64 in 2025, a relentless downward slope for 75 years. Don’t believe me? After reading this article, please examine the chart in Appendix A titled, “U.S. Congress: Bills Introduced vs. Bills Passed (1947–2024)”. I think you will be alarmed.

The facts tell the story:

• Bills Enacted (laws passed): From an average of 920 per Congress in 1950 to 362 in 2022, with 2025 plummeting to 64^[1]

• Passage Rates: From 54 percent of bills passing the Senate in 1956 to 1.2 percent in 2025^[3]

• Legislative Complexity: Bills have expanded from an average of 2.5 pages to 24.5 pages, or roughly 625 words to 6,000+ words per bill, a tenfold increase^[2]

• Sitting in Session: The House spent nearly eight weeks out of session in 2025, coinciding with the longest government shutdown in American history^[1]

Congress isn’t just less productive. Congress is now irrelevant.

The Gridlock Paradox: Fewer Bills, But Each a Monster

Here’s something remarkable that nobody talks about: As Congress passes fewer bills, each bill becomes dramatically longer and more complex.

This is backwards. You’d expect streamlined, focused legislation. Instead, you get comprehensive omnibus bills that try to cram multiple policy objectives into a single bloated package and then get stuck in gridlock anyway. Congress is caught in a trap:

• Individual bills can’t pass because they’re too controversial

• So members try to bundle them together to find compromise

• But that makes them even more complex and controversial

• So fewer pass anyway

In 1950, Congress passed 921 bills averaging 2.5 pages each. In 2025, Congress passed 64 bills averaging 24.5 pages each.

The math is devastating: 921 bills × 2.5 pages = 2,303 pages of legislation enacted in 1950. 64 bills × 24.5 pages = 1,568 pages of legislation enacted in 2025. Congress is enacting less policy while spending more time on each bill.

What Broken Looks Like

The New York Times captured the immediate cause: Speaker Mike Johnson, terrified of drawing President Trump’s ire, spent more time avoiding votes than calling them. He maneuvered to prevent the House from voting on canceling Trump’s tariffs. He blocked a bipartisan bill to extend healthcare subsidies. He evaded votes on releasing the Epstein files.^[1]

His own party members, including die-hard Trump allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene, were so fed up with the dysfunction that they started heading for the exits, deliberately shrinking their own majority.

Members had to use what’s known as a discharge petition (an arcane maneuver that effectively goes around the speaker) four times in 2025 to force votes on anything the leadership didn’t want to address. Before 2025, this had rarely succeeded.^[1]

And while Congress spun its wheels on actual legislation, it erupted in partisan warfare, censuring and reprimanding members on the House floor at a pace not seen since 2023, when the body was so dysfunctional it expelled one of its own members.

Here are four metrics that showcase 2025’s unprecedented breakdown:

• 362 roll call votes (second lowest in 25 years)^[1]

• 64 bills enacted (tied for worst since 2001)^[1]

• 8 weeks out of session (longest govt. shutdown ever)^[1]

• 4 successful discharge petitions (rare maneuver to override Speaker)^[1]

This is what institutional collapse looks like: not with a bang, but with members of the same party working against each other, using arcane parliamentary procedures to override their own leadership, while the body loses the capacity to do anything meaningful.

But here’s the critical insight the New York Times missed:

This is not unique to 2025. This is not unique to Republican control. This is the predictable endpoint of a seventy-year decline.

Both Parties Built This Collapse

Let’s be direct about something uncomfortable: Both parties contributed to this catastrophe.

The decline began in the late 1970s, accelerated through the Reagan and Bush years, continued through Clinton, sped up under George W. Bush, and achieved new lows under Obama, Trump, and Biden. This is not a partisan failure. This is an institutional failure that both parties have participated in creating.^[4]

In 1956, 56 percent of introduced bills became law.^[2] In 2025, it’s 1.2 percent. House passage rates have similarly collapsed. This happened across Democratic administrations, Republican administrations, and divided governments.

The decline is constant. Relentless. It doesn’t matter which party is in power. Why? Because the ROOT CAUSE isn’t which party controls Congress. The root cause is something far deeper that both parties have been complicit in allowing.

How Money Pushed the Parties to the Extremes

Here’s what the data reveals when you trace it carefully:

The Root Cause: Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating dramatically after Citizens United in 2010,^[5] special interest money fundamentally transformed both political parties. Money flowed not to moderate, consensus-building candidates, but to ideological purists at the party extremes. This created a perverse incentive structure where politicians survive not by appealing to the broad center, but by appealing to donors and activists at the ideological fringes.

Up until the late 1960s, American political parties were genuine organizations. Local Democratic and Republican clubs met year-round. They recruited candidates from their neighborhoods. Party bosses controlled nominations. The actual power and decision making happened in the political middle, among moderates of both parties, where consensus could be built.

Then special interest money changed everything. As wealthy donors and ideological foundations began pouring unlimited resources into politics (especially post-Citizens United), they didn’t fund centrist candidates.⁵ They funded their ideological allies: immigration hardliners on the right, climate absolutists on the left, anti-tax billionaires funding Republicans, maximum-government advocates funding Democrats. These donors didn’t want compromise. They wanted total victory on their single issue. They demanded ideological purity, not bipartisan pragmatism.

The result: Both parties migrated toward their extremes simultaneously, abandoning the center where Congress used to operate.

The Effects of Party Radicalization: This movement to the extremes created a cascade of effects that appear to be separate problems but are actually symptoms of the same root cause:

• Increased polarization: When both parties abandoned the center and moved to ideological purity, the two sides stopped viewing each other as loyal opponents and started viewing each other as existential threats. Compromise became politically impossible.

• Gerrymandering became a weapon: Safe districts are attractive to extremist candidates. Before radicalization, gerrymandering was less used because politicians could win by appealing to centrist voters even in opposing districts. After radicalization, both parties weaponized it to entrench extreme positions.

• Primary politics turned vicious: Donors and special interests poured money into primary challenges against centrist incumbents. Candidates learned that ideological purity, not problem-solving, was rewarded with funding. The center became a graveyard of primary defeats.

• Media fragmentation accelerated: As both parties polarized, people with extreme views sought media that matched their views. Cable news and social media responded with partisan content. But the media didn’t create the polarization, the polarization created the demand for partisan media.

• The filibuster became a constant weapon: Before parties radicalized, the filibuster was rare and negotiable. After radicalization, it became routine because the underlying positions became irreconcilable. You can’t compromise between “maximum government control” and “zero regulation.” The filibuster is a symptom of that incompatibility.

• Presidents expanded power: As Congress became paralyzed by internal radicalization, presidents from both parties filled the void with executive orders. Biden on student loans. Trump on tariffs and immigration. They didn’t choose to govern unilaterally; Congress simply couldn’t legislate anymore.

The Outcome: Congressional Collapse

When both parties are controlled by their extremes, when the center has been abandoned, when donors expect ideological purity rather than problem-solving, Congress loses the capacity to legislate.

This is the outcome we see in 2025: 64 bills passed. Gridlock regardless of which party has power. An institution that has become irrelevant because the two parties can no longer find common ground.

Congress itself didn’t lose its capacity to legislate because of some mysterious institutional decay. Congress lost its capacity because the parties controlling it have become ideologically irreconcilable. The parties pulled Congress apart by migrating to the extremes. That’s the cause. The legislative collapse is the effect.

Why This Matters: Understanding the Mechanism

It’s critical to understand this cause-and-effect chain because it explains why 2025 looks exactly like a 2023 Democratic Congress or a 2017 Republican Congress. It explains why swapping parties doesn’t fix anything.

Both parties are now fundamentally captured by their extremes. Both expect their members never to compromise. Both have abandoned the 60% of Americans living in the center.

A centrist Republican who tries to negotiate with a Democrat faces primary challenges funded by right-wing donors. A centrist Democrat who tries to find common ground with a Republican faces primary challenges funded by progressive foundations. The incentive structure doesn’t allow moderation. It punishes it.

This is why Congress has become a dead zone: not because individual legislators are worse, but because the parties themselves have become incompatible forces. The money demands purity. The donors demand victory. The members who try to work across the aisle get primaried.

The Political Stalemate Everyone Misses

Here’s what will happen next: Democrats will likely gain control of the House in November’s elections. They’ll win some seats. Maybe they’ll flip the chamber. Centrist voters will think: Finally. Things will change.

They won’t.

Whether the Democrats control all three branches, or Republicans do, or power is divided between them, it doesn’t matter anymore. The legislative branch has become a dead zone regardless of who controls it.

Consider the evidence:

• 2025: Republicans controlled House, Senate, and presidency. Result: 64 bills enacted

• 2023: Republicans controlled House, Democrats controlled Senate, Biden was president (divided government). Result: 65 bills enacted

• 2021-2022: Republicans controlled House, Democrats controlled Senate and presidency (divided government). Result: 362 bills enacted in 2022 alone, still historically low

The variable isn’t which party has power. The variable is that Congress has structurally lost the capacity to legislate. Power is now distributed as follows:

• Congress: 10-15 percent of actual power (mostly ceremonial or reactive)

• The Presidency: 50-60 percent of actual power (executive orders, administrative action, commander-in-chief authority)

• The Courts: 15-20 percent of actual power (judicial review, constitutional interpretation)

• Special Interests/Lobbyists: 15-20 percent of actual power (money influencing elections and policy)

This distribution didn’t happen by accident. And it can’t be fixed by swapping which party is in charge.

What Other Democracies Have Figured Out

Here’s something most Americans don’t realize: Other democracies have found ways to make their governments work, not by electing better people, but by changing the rules of the game.

Take Germany. Their voting system makes it nearly impossible for one party to control everything. Since 1949, they’ve had exactly one single-party government, and that lasted just four years. Every other government has required multiple parties to work together, negotiate, and compromise just to function. It’s not optional. It’s built into the system.

Canada does it differently. They’ve had fourteen minority governments since becoming a country. That means the party in power has to cut deals with opposition parties to pass anything. No ramming through partisan wish lists. No “we won, so we do whatever we want.” If you want to govern, you negotiate.

Australia took yet another approach: two center-right parties formed a permanent partnership in 1946 that lasted nearly 80 years. They had to negotiate with each other constantly: urban interests versus rural interests, different priorities, different constituencies. But they governed together because neither could win alone.

What do these countries have in common? Their systems force politicians to build coalitions. Not because politicians are nicer or smarter. It’s because the math requires it. You can’t pass anything without working across party lines.

America went the opposite direction. We built a winner-take-all system that creates only two outcomes. First outcome: one party wins everything and tries to ram through their entire agenda alone, breeding resentment and guaranteeing reversal when power inevitably flips. Second outcome: power is divided, so both parties block each other and gridlock paralyzes everything. The result is always the same. Congress becomes irrelevant. Presidents rule by executive order.

The irony? This is fixable. Not by electing different people. By changing the structure.

A genuine third party, a centrist force representing the 60% of Americans abandoned by both extremes, would change everything. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But it would change the math. Suddenly, no party could govern alone. Democrats would need coalition partners. Republicans would need coalition partners. The Centercratic Party would need coalition partners.

Coalition-building would become necessary, not optional. Compromise would be required, not punished. And Congress might actually start legislating again.

This isn’t radical. It’s how most successful democracies work. The question is whether Americans are ready to try something different or whether we’re content watching Congress collapse while presidents become kings.

The Irony Trump Discovered (By Accident)

Ironically, this is why Trump’s rise has accelerated Congress’s decline.

Trump is not responsible for creating a weak Congress. But he has shown what a president can do when Congress abdicates power. He uses executive orders. He pressures his party members publicly. He bypasses traditional legislative processes. He acts unilaterally on tariffs, immigration, personnel decisions, and more.

This should horrify both Democrats and Republicans. But the left sees a Republican president doing it, so they focus on opposition rather than restoration of congressional power. The right sees their president being strong, so they cheer executive action rather than demanding their institution (Congress) regain relevance.

Congress has become so weak that even when it should be jealously guarding its power, neither party can muster the will to do it. Republicans are more interested in loyalty to the president than to the institution. Democrats are more interested in opposing the president than in restoring congressional power.

This is how democracies die. Not through dramatic coups, but through the slow erosion of institutional power, one compromised compromise at a time.

What Rebuilding Actually Requires

Let’s be clear about what would fix this: Not more talking. Not more bipartisan summits. Not better rhetoric from leaders.

Structural change.

Here are the three things that would actually matter:

1. Multi-party representation and coalition governments

The two-party system creates binary thinking: if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Adding a credible third party forces negotiation. Coalition governments, by definition, require compromise. The Centercratic Party’s very existence, bringing centrist voters and business leaders into the conversation, changes the incentive structure. No longer would Democrats assume they can push 100 percent of their agenda when they have a majority. No longer would Republicans assume they can ignore Democrats entirely. Coalition-building becomes necessary, not optional.

2. Campaign finance reform and transparency

Congress’s decline is linked to its captured-ness. Members spend more time on fundraising calls than on legislative work. They’re accountable to donors more than constituents. Transparent campaign finance and spending limits would free members to legislate rather than fundraise.

3. Structural reforms to the legislative process

• Automatic sunsets: Laws should have expiration dates, forcing Congress to revisit them periodically rather than leaving broken programs in place.

• Simplified procedures: The filibuster and other arcane procedural tools have made the Senate nearly non-functional. Streamlined procedures for debate and voting would help.

• Mandatory bipartisan commission structures: For complex issues, require legislative commissions with balanced party representation, creating shared ownership of solutions.

These aren’t radical. They’re structural fixes that stop dysfunction. Period.

The Path Forward: Why This Moment Matters

Here’s why 2025 is significant: not because it’s the worst year (though it nearly is), but because it’s the moment America can see clearly what’s been happening.

The New York Times made it visible.^[1] The data makes it undeniable. Even Trump, who benefits from a weak Congress, is discovering that an incompetent Congress can’t even do the things he wants, hence his frustration with tariff votes, healthcare subsidies, the Epstein files.

This is the moment to say: We can rebuild this.

Not by replacing one party with another. Not by electing better individuals (though we should always do that). But by changing the structure that rewards gridlock and punishes legislating.

The Centercratic Party’s core principle is relevant here: Seek unity through broad support. Develop policies that build long-term national unity.

In a legislature with genuine three-party representation, unity becomes necessary. Not because politicians suddenly become more virtuous, but because the math requires it. You can’t pass anything without coalition partners. That forces genuine negotiation, real compromise, and legislation that doesn’t swing wildly every two years.

A Future Worth Fighting For

Imagine Congress in early 2031:

• A centrist coalition in the House includes Democrats, Republicans, and Centercrats working together

• Because no single party can pass bills alone, they have to actually address concerns from multiple perspectives

• Healthcare reform happens because a coalition sees it’s beneficial for everyone, not because one party rams it through

• Tax policy balances growth incentives with fiscal responsibility because the coalition requires both

• Immigration policy addresses both border security and labor needs because coalition partners represent both concerns

• Climate and energy policy acknowledges both environmental concerns and economic impacts because you can’t pass it without both voices

In this scenario, Congress is relevant again. Presidential power is constrained by actual legislative oversight. Courts have clearer laws to interpret. Special interests have to work through multiple parties, reducing their influence.

This isn’t fantasy. This is how other democracies govern.

America will have to rebuild Congress deliberately, through structural change and political will.

The barrier isn’t capability. It’s political will. And political will follows incentive structures.

The Challenge to America

For over seventy years, Congress has declined. Both parties have participated. Both parties have benefited in short-term tactical ways from gridlock. Both parties have failed to defend the institution.

The result: A system where the presidency has become nearly imperial, where courts are the only body making major decisions, where Congress is an afterthought.

This is not the system the founders designed. And it’s not sustainable.

The 2026 midterms offer a choice: Another election where we swap which party has power, knowing it won’t matter? Or a moment to actually change the structure?

The Centercratic Party represents the latter. Not because we have all the answers. But because we’ve accepted a basic truth that both legacy parties have rejected:

The two-party system is not serving America anymore.

Adding a genuine centrist third force doesn’t fix everything overnight. But it changes the incentive structure. It requires coalition building. It makes grandstanding more expensive and legislating more valuable.

Congress won’t rebuild itself. Presidents won’t voluntarily give up power. Courts can’t restore legislative authority.

The question isn’t whether it’s possible.

The question is: Are we ready?

One Final Note: Why This Matters to You

You’re reading this because you know something is broken. You feel it in:

• Government that can’t address infrastructure despite obvious need

• Healthcare costs that nobody believes will improve

• Immigration debates that go in circles while nothing changes

• Social Security and Medicare that everyone knows need reform but nobody will touch

• Climate and energy policy that swings wildly depending on which party is in power

• A constant state of crisis where Congress is either in shutdown or struggling to pass basic funding

This isn’t coincidence. It’s the inevitable result of a legislative body that has lost its capacity to legislate.

The good news: This can be fixed. Not easily. Not quickly. But it can be fixed.

It requires Americans to demand more from Congress. It requires voters to value legislative capability over party loyalty. It requires a willingness to experiment with different political structures.

The Centercratic Party exists because Americans are ready for this. Seventy years of data showing Congress’s decline. One year—2025—making it undeniable.

The question now is whether America will act.

The Monday Breakdown is investigative journalism about government failures that mainstream media misses or ignores. We dig into auditor reports, inspector general findings, history, and data that reveals what has happened and what’s actually happening in our institutions.

What’s broken in your community that Congress should be fixing but isn’t? Share your story. Your experience is data. Your frustration is evidence. Together, we’re building a case for genuine change.

Appendix

Sources:

Brookings Institution. “Vital Statistics on Congress: Chapter 6 – Legislative Productivity in Congress and Workload,” Tables 6-1 and 6-2. Updated November 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/vital-statistics-on-congress/. Data originally sourced from the Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, and the Congressional Record.

U.S. Congress. “118th Congress (2023-2024).” Congress.gov, Library of Congress. https://www.congress.gov/browse/118th-congress.

References

1. The New York Times. (2025). “How the House Slumped to Historic Lows of Productivity in 2025.” Link

2. Congressional Research Service. (2004). “Congressional Statistics: Bills Introduced and Laws Enacted, 1947-2003.” Semantic Scholar. Link

3. Eatough, Mandi, and Jessica R. Preece. (2024). “Crediting Invisible Work: Congress and the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM).” American Political Science Review 118(3): 1–19. Link

4. Historical congressional productivity data compiled from multiple legislative sessions, 1970s-2025.

5. Supreme Court of the United States. (2010, January 21). “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310.” Link