We Don’t Have a Functioning Government

We are trained to imagine democratic collapse as a single dramatic event. Tanks in the street. Emergency broadcasts. A constitution shredded on live television. But that is rarely how democratic failure actually arrives. More often, it looks like drift. It looks like paralysis. It looks like a government that still has the buildings, titles, hearings, and cameras, but no longer performs the basic job of governing.

That is where the United States feels dangerously close to now.

Because what are we actually looking at?

A Congress that barely legislates. A cabinet full of people who increasingly sound like they work for one man instead of the public. A president who acts as though the limits on his power are mostly whatever he personally decides they are. And a public that is expected to keep pretending this is just noisy politics as usual.

It isn’t.

By late December 2025, Congress had enacted fewer than 40 laws, which major reporting described as a modern record low for the first year of a new presidency. Reuters had already documented the broader downward trend in congressional productivity, showing how lawmaking had been collapsing for years under the weight of polarization, obstruction, and performative politics. So when people say Congress feels useless, they are not being dramatic. They are describing a measurable reality.

And when the legislative branch stops functioning like a serious governing body, power does not just disappear. It moves.

That is exactly what we have watched happen. Reuters reported in January that, one year into his return to office, Donald Trump appeared to be wielding executive power with few restraints, expanding presidential authority while Congress did little to impede him. Even after a February Supreme Court setback on tariffs, Reuters still described Washington as a capital increasingly shaped by Trump’s power, threats, and whims. In other words, the danger is not just that Trump wants more power. It is that the other institutions keep teaching him he can take it.

And then there is the culture of the administration itself.

Over and over, top officials fall back on some version of the same line: they “serve at the pleasure of the president.” In a narrow legal sense, that phrase is real. Cabinet members are appointed by the president and can be removed by him. That is how the structure works. But what should be a technical description of appointment power increasingly sounds like a statement of personal loyalty. It no longer lands as “I hold this office under constitutional rules.” It lands as “my job is to serve him.”

And that distinction matters.

Cabinet officers are not supposed to be courtiers. They shouldn't act as brand ambassadors for a single person. They are supposed to oversee departments that affect the lives of millions of Americans and carry independent obligations to the law, to the Constitution, and to the public. When the dominant tone shifts from loyalty upward to responsibility outward, it tells you something important about how power is understood within the executive branch.

That is also why the parade of incompetence matters so much.

Any administration can have weak appointees or scandal-prone officials. That part is not new. What is new is how little consequence seems to follow from open incompetence, public absurdity, or obvious unfitness for the seriousness of the job. In a functioning system, those things trigger sustained oversight and real political cost. In a failing one, they become content. They become one more clip, one more headline, one more scandal swallowed by the scroll.

And Congress, the branch designed to investigate, restrain, legislate, and defend its own authority, keeps acting like a ghost branch.

Even the rhythm of official Washington contributes to that feeling. The Senate’s 2025 schedule included repeated state work periods and lengthy breaks across the year, including multi-week stretches in spring, summer, and late fall. Lawmakers do not only work when they are on the floor, obviously. But when the visible output is historically weak and oversight feels nearly absent, the public impression becomes unavoidable: nobody is actually governing in a way ordinary people can feel.

So no, I do not mean we literally have no government. We have something maybe more dangerous than that: the shell of a government that still performs authority without consistently performing accountability. The institutions still exist. The offices are still filled. The press conferences still happen. But the basic democratic promise, that power will be checked, abuses confronted, and public problems addressed through representative institutions, feels thinner by the day.

That is why this is bigger than Donald Trump, even though he is the loudest and most obvious expression of the crisis.

The real story is what kind of system was waiting for him. A Congress so polarized, so performative, and so comfortable with inaction that it has steadily emptied itself of relevance. An executive branch culture that increasingly speaks the language of personal loyalty. Institutions that keep mistaking survival for health. And a political class that still wants us to believe we are watching normal democratic friction instead of systemic failure.

We keep waiting for the dramatic moment when someone announces that democracy is over. But maybe that instinct is the problem. Maybe the more honest question is this: what do you call it when the legislature barely legislates, the executive keeps absorbing more power, top officials talk like they serve a man instead of a country, and accountability becomes optional for the powerful?

Whatever we call it, it is not healthy. It is not normal. And it is not a functioning government.