Part Two: Congressional Reform Blog Series
In Part One of the We the Doers’ Congressional Reform blog series, we laid out why we’re committed to tackling Congressional reform. In this post, Part Two, we will delve into the role of Congress in creating the conditions for the federal government to effectively deliver the results that the American people expect and deserve.
In our first workshop, we asked senior-level former civil servants from a wide range of federal agencies “What would it take to make the federal government truly effective and efficient?”
And even though we were ostensibly gathered to talk about how to reform the executive branch, our conversation kept coming back to Congress — and how the dysfunction in the legislative branch was the mirror image, and often the driver, of dysfunction in the executive branch.
We distilled our recommendations into four goals related to Congress:
- Create clarity for Congress and the public about what agencies are supposed to deliver, and how well they are delivering
- Introduce a meaningful feedback loop between civil servants and elected officials
- Fix the dysfunctional budget process by moving from one-year to two-year budgeting, and eliminating government shutdowns
- Reverse the spend-it-all incentive by allowing agencies to save half of unexpended funds to invest in modernizing operations and improving customer service
In this post, we will break down each one of these goals — why it matters, why it’s historically been hard to accomplish, and why we believe this time is different.
Create clarity for Congress and the public about what agencies are supposed to deliver, and how well they are delivering
Why It’s Necessary
In a private sector company, measuring success is easy. The bottom line is shareholder value in terms of net profit (revenue minus expenses). Government agencies have not had the luxury of such clarity. Without this information, it’s hard for Congress or voters to know which programs most cost-effectively deliver desired results, which in turn makes it hard to decide which programs should be expanded and which should sunset.
Why It’s Hard
Creating meaningful outcome clarity would require Congress to make harder choices about what success looks like, what tradeoffs are acceptable, and how to compare programs that serve very different purposes. It would also shift power by making performance more legible to members outside the traditional centers of budget and oversight control.
Why Now
This is the right moment to define bottom-line outcomes because public frustration with government performance is high, but trust cannot be rebuilt through rhetoric alone. People want to know what government is supposed to do, whether it is doing it, and whether the money is worth it. At the same time, advances in data infrastructure and service measurement make it far more possible than in past decades to track meaningful outcomes across programs and over time.
If Congress does not create this clarity now, the vacuum will continue to be filled by shallow proxies such as dollars spent, forms processed, or headlines generated. A more disciplined, statutory approach to outcomes would give both Congress and the public a common language for accountability before the next crisis forces another round of reactive reform.
Introduce a meaningful feedback loop between civil servants and elected officials
Why It’s Necessary
The dysfunction begins with voluminous legislation that members of Congress could not possibly have the time to understand, or even read, prior to a vote. As a result, Congress continues to add more programs and requirements without ever seeming to take any away, and the bureaucracy strains to the breaking point.
Because Congress and the executive branch have made procurement and hiring policies incredibly unwieldy, program staff are unable to draft the necessary new regulations and shepherd them through the lengthy public comment process; develop new policies, procedures, and forms to reflect the new requirements; educate eligible recipients about the program changes; and upgrade or build the necessary technical infrastructure to deliver the program requirements.
Those who would benefit from swift implementation of the new program or requirement then start complaining to their member of Congress that the agency’s implementation is too slow. Congress responds by passing yet more prescriptive legislation, further restricting implementers’ flexibility to adjust resources in real time as dictated by a fluid operational situation.
Why It’s Hard
A real feedback loop would require Congress to hear directly from the people who implement federal law, including when their message is that a statute is unworkable, underfunded, internally contradictory, or impossible to execute on the timeline promised. That kind of candor is uncomfortable for everyone involved. Members of Congress are likely to view it as the same old broken record of bureaucratic resistance, agency leaders may worry about loss of message control, and civil servants themselves often have little incentive to speak openly in a system where career advancement depends on remaining under the radar.
There is also no obvious place for this feedback to go. Existing oversight mechanisms are fragmented, episodic, and often performative. Creating a real loop would mean building formal channels, protections, expectations, and committee capacity to receive operational feedback and use it constructively rather than politically.
Why Now
The cost of legislating without implementation feedback has become too visible to ignore. Congress continues to enact ambitious policies into a system already strained by hiring constraints, procurement delays, aging technology, and fragmented accountability. The result is a growing mismatch between what lawmakers promise and what agencies can actually deliver. In the previous administration, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law made about $711.8 billion available for grants to tribes, states, localities, and territories, but as of December 31, 2024, agencies had outlayed only about $119.4 billion of the funds available for that period. In the current administration, the One Big Beautiful Bill likewise created major new tax and benefit changes on an aggressive timetable, but agencies almost immediately had to issue transition relief and implementation guidance to make the law administrable in practice.
At the same time, there is rising interest across ideological lines in “state capacity,” government delivery, and the gap between policy intent and operational reality. That creates an unusual opening to frame civil servant feedback not as bureaucratic insubordination, but as basic governance infrastructure: a way to help Congress write better laws, exercise smarter oversight, and avoid repeating the same implementation failures over and over.
Fix the dysfunctional budget process by moving from one-year to two-year budgeting, and eliminating government shutdowns
Why It’s Necessary
Most years, by the time Congress passes a real appropriation — which unlike a continuing resolution can include funds to address pressing agency needs and long-term goals, including investments in critical infrastructure and hiring to address the unfunded mandates discussed above — there is often only 9 months (or less) remaining in the fiscal year. However, a “full and open competition” for a new contract requires 18 months of lead time. So, agencies either use shortcuts that increase costs or fail to make the needed investment at all.
Why It’s Hard
The current annual budget cycle is a power structure problem as much as it is a calendar problem. Repeated deadlines, short-term continuing resolutions, and the constant threat of shutdowns create leverage for leadership, appropriators, and ideological factions that know must-pass moments are when concessions can be extracted. A shift to two-year budgeting and a true end to shutdown brinkmanship would reduce those pressure points, making the system more stable but also redistributing political leverage away from the actors who currently benefit from instability.
It is also difficult because budget reform has to be coordinated across authorizers, appropriators, leadership, and both chambers, with agreement on both the mechanics and on what discipline or accountability measures would accompany greater funding predictability.
Why Now
Continuing resolutions and shutdown threats create chaos, at a rate that seems to only ever increase. They force agencies to delay hiring, postpone projects, overpay for rushed work, and spend months preparing for disruption instead of serving the public.
There is also growing public exhaustion with shutdown politics and broad recognition that governing by crisis is wasteful, in the shadow of last year’s DOGE debacle. That makes this a stronger moment than usual to argue that predictable funding is a prerequisite for competent government. If Congress wants better execution, it has to stop sabotaging implementation through the budget process itself.
Reverse the spend-it-all incentive by allowing agencies to save half of unexpended funds to invest in modernizing operations and improving customer service
Why It’s Necessary
When adjusting agency budgets upwards or downwards, Congress tends to penalize agencies who “fail” to spend all the money appropriated in a prior year, under the assumption that if the agency did not spend all the money appropriated, it must not have needed it. As a result, agency heads tend to push staff to spend as much money as possible at the end of the year.
Why It’s Hard
This reform challenges the assumption that unobligated funds signal excess, inefficiency, or weak execution rather than prudent management. Allowing agencies to retain a portion of savings would require Congress to trust agencies to reinvest those funds wisely, and to distinguish between strategic underspending and simple failure to execute. That is a hard sell in a system built around annual obligation targets and skepticism of agency discretion – made even harder after the Loper-Bright decision declared agencies unable to make choices about how to manage themselves through inevitable ambiguity.
This change would also require appropriators and overseers to create new rules for what qualifies as savings, how retained funds may be used, and how to prevent gaming. We are asking Congress to replace a blunt punishment mechanism with a nuanced accountability framework.
Why Now
The status quo is actively undermining modernization. Agencies know that if they spend carefully and come in under budget they may be penalized next year, so the rational response is to obligate funds quickly rather than steward them strategically. That dynamic rewards short-term consumption over long-term improvement, even as nearly everyone agrees the federal government needs better technology, simpler processes, and stronger customer service.
This is the right time to change the incentive because fiscal pressure is rising and there is bipartisan interest in efficiency, even if the term means different things to different people. A savings-retention model offers a practical way to align efficiency with better delivery by rewarding agencies that find room to reinvest in doing the job better.
The Path Forward: Creating the Conditions for Success
We the Doers members are optimists, but we’re not naïve. We know that the path ahead will be difficult, and success is not guaranteed.
But we also believe that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the rules of the game in a way that makes winning possible.
Historically, Congress has re-invented itself at approximately 60-year intervals — and we are due for the next round of reinvention this decade. The last major effort to re-align committee jurisdictions and reassert the power of the legislative branch was back in the 1970s, long before the Internet revolution transformed government and society.
The time is therefore ripe to redefine authorities, fortify the links between Congress and the executive entities it oversees, and empower our representatives to undertake the work they were sent to Washington to do.
Note: This is Part Two of our four-part blog series on reforming Congress. In Part Three, We the Doers’ Congressional procedure expert (and former Assistant Parliamentarian of the U.S. House of Representatives) Max Spitzer will tackle why Congress doesn’t work, and in Part Four, Max will explain what it will take for Congress to reform and renew itself.