Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Congress on pace to be among least productive ever
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Congress in action, or inaction? This Congress among the least productive
Monday, March 4, 2024
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers passed a last-minute budget extension last Thursday to head off a looming Friday government shutdown – just the 40th law passed by this Congress, which is on pace to be the least productive in at least a half-century.
Those 40 bills – four of which were continuing resolutions to extend the budget that Congress has been unable to pass since fiscal 2024 started October 1 – are about 11% of what would normally be passed at this point in a typical congressional session.
The number of bills that have been passed by one chamber and are stalled in the other is only slightly better, at about 30%. The 118th Congress was sworn in on January 3, 2023, and runs through January 3, 2025.
“The current Congress has produced, to date … 39 laws compared to, for example, 362 in the last Congress,” Craig Volden, director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, said before Thursday’s votes. “It’s not done yet, but that seems well below the pace we would expect.
“I don’t know about the least-effective ever in history, and there’s still time to go, but by those numbers, it seems like a big hill to climb,” Volden said.
But Sarah Binder thinks it is irresponsible to “make our judgment based on the paltry number of laws enacted after one year.” Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, instead urged people to take a more holistic view of the Congress after its full term.
“I do think it’s important to take the measure of Congress after the full two years has elapsed,” Binder said.
Binder also believes that the low number of bills passed can be partially blamed on changes in the ways Congress has decided to legislate in recent years, with an increased emphasis on passing a few large bills rather than many smaller ones.
“Counting up the laws enacted … kind of misses the boat in how Congress has legislated over in the past, I would say two, three decades, which is the rise of what we think of as omnibus legislating, which is packing numerous measures into a single mammoth, often thousand-page bill,” she said.
Those mammoth bills include the 12 separate budget bills that keep the government open. But lawmakers have been unable to pass any of those, voting instead to pass “continuing resolutions” that keep operations funded at previous levels while they try to agree on a budget.
Since the start of the current fiscal year, Congress had passed three such resolutions, the last of which were set to expire this Friday and next. The House voted 320-99 Thursday afternoon to push those deadlines back to March 8 and March 22 and, just hours later, the Senate voted 76-13 to give the bill final approval and send it to the president for his signature.
The budget is not the only thing backed up. After Senate Republicans refused to pass military aide for Ukraine and Israel unless it was tied to immigration reform, a bipartisan group of senators spent weeks negotiating a border package – only to have it rejected by GOP senators who said it did not go far enough.
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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