Congress Is Broken and Unpopular: Here Are 12 Reforms Children and Families Need

Here are a dozen reforms that would, at the very least, improve things for our kids.

Americans’ approval of Congress has fallen to 10%, while disapproval has climbed to 86%, tying the record high for the institution.

That is not a partisan finding. Currently, 11% of independents and just 3% of Democrats approve of the job Congress is doing. And notably, Republicans have driven most of the recent decline. Congress has managed to disappoint virtually everyone, across party lines, at the same time.

Source: Brenan, M. (2026, Apr. 22). Disapproval of Congress Ties Record High at 86%. Gallup.

You might think that kind of historic unpopularity would prompt some soul-searching or at least some strategic rethinking. If nine out of ten Americans disapprove of what you’re doing, perhaps try doing something different. Maybe one might try doing something popular. And here’s the thing: investing in children is popular.

Child care, children’s health, education, and nutrition consistently rank among the most broadly supported policy ideas in American politics. Children are the one constituency that virtually everyone agrees deserves better.

Yet Congress routinely fails to deliver for them.

So why doesn’t Congress act? Because popularity is not the same as political power, and in Washington, power is what moves legislation. That gap between what the public wants and what Congress delivers is not an accident. It is the product of broken structures, perverse incentives, and a system that has been deliberately engineered to serve those with money, organization, and votes: none of which children have.

A recent paper by James Wallner and Soren Dayton for the Foundation for American Innovation opens with a blunt diagnosis:

Congress is broken. The House and Senate do not deliberate — much less legislate — on the issues most important to voters. On the rare occasions when Congress works, it does so by relying on a centralized process dominated by party leaders that makes it harder for rank-and-file lawmakers to influence the legislative process.

The authors argue that most lawmakers don’t know what’s happening in negotiations until party leaders unveil the final product of their private deliberations. When leadership does act, it relies on deadlines, or “cliffs,” to force quick floor action on legislation.

That diagnosis resonates deeply with those of us working on children’s policy. We’ve watched it play out in real time — not just in children’s issues being dropped on the cutting room floor in legislative backrooms, but much earlier, in the moments before a bill even exists. The breakdown starts when a congressional office asks: “Can we even introduce this?”

“Mother May I?”: The Permission Structure That Kills Bills Before They’re Born

Remember the children’s game “Mother May I?” — where you can’t take a single step without first asking permission, and the answer is often no?

That’s Congress today, at least when it comes to legislation that benefits children.

In theory, any member of Congress can introduce a bill. That’s civics class. That’s Schoolhouse Rock.

Source: “I’m Just a Bill,” Schoolhouse Rock

In practice, a very different process has taken over. Before a bill is even drafted — let alone introduced — staff in member offices routinely feel the need to run the concept by committee staff, then by leadership staff, then sometimes back to committee staff again. If the goal is a bipartisan bill, this same process begins on the other side of the aisle in an endless cycle.

At each checkpoint, the bill can be stalled, redirected, discouraged, edited, or quietly killed. No formal vote is cast. No public record is made. The idea just doesn’t ever move or even happen.

We’ve seen promising children’s legislation — bills to expand health care access, strengthen the Child Tax Credit for the lowest-income families, protect foster youth, and make child care affordable — sit in pre-introduction limbo for months. Not because members opposed them, but because the permission structure said: “not yet, not like this, not with that cosponsor, or we have a different idea for you.”

And once you do somehow get a green light for one version of a bill, the process often starts all over again if you want to add a bipartisan cosponsor from the other party. A Democratic sponsor may clear introduction with Democratic committee staff and leadership, only to discover that bringing on a Republican cosponsor requires a whole new round of approvals, or vice versa.

The permission structure is not a single gate — it’s a gauntlet.

And even if you finally get to the introduction of a bipartisan bill, it can still fall apart. We once got a bipartisan bill introduced in one session of Congress to have one of the members drop off when the member of the other party was in election cycle. Leadership looks down upon “helping” or working with a member from the other party who is in election cycle. After their overwhelming victory, the other senator was in cycle, so the lead sponsor refused to introduce it with them.

In six years, our little bill to help children went from having bipartisan support, to a solo partisan bill, to no bill at all. Partisan politics killed a bipartisan children’s bill that had no public opposition.

This is not how Congress is supposed to work.

There was a time when bipartisanship was rewarded rather than punished. When my former boss, Sen. Bob Graham (FL), joined the Senate Finance Committee, members were told by committee leadership that bipartisan bills would receive priority. Members were incentivized to find common ground with members of the other party — and they did, working across party lines on Medicare, children’s health, child welfare, tax policy, and trade.

Today, that spirit is gone.

The result? Children’s legislation that enjoys genuine support from members of both parties never gets introduced, heard, or debated.

“Red Pen Syndrome”: When Everybody Is an Editor

Even when a bill makes it through the permission gauntlet, a second dysfunction kicks in: what I call Red Pen Syndrome.

In a healthy legislative process, a bill gets introduced, advocacy groups rally support or raise concerns, proposed amendments emerge, cosponsors are added, and then the bill goes through committee review and an amendment process, followed by leadership consideration. The legislative process refines the bill through a public process.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work. Introduction is the beginning, not the result, of extensive deliberation.

But today, that process has been inverted. Bills are subjected to exhaustive pre-introduction review by committee staff, leadership staff, and sometimes outside stakeholders — each with their own red pen, each adding conditions or revisions. The draft that eventually emerges — if it emerges at all — has been edited so many times, by so many people, that the original idea is often barely recognizable. And if any single reviewer at any stage raises an objection, the whole process can restart from scratch.

The perfect has become not just the enemy of the good, but the enemy of anything at all.

This inversion is maddening for advocates because we can’t organize around a blank page. When a bill hasn’t been introduced, there is no bill number to circulate, no sponsor to stand behind, no text to brief congressional offices on, no vehicle for constituent outreach, and no mechanism for the public to weigh in.

The absence of an introduced bill isn’t just a process problem — it’s an advocacy blackout. Children’s issues, which already suffer from structural invisibility in Washington, become even more invisible when the very tool of advocacy is withheld.

The result is a vicious cycle: no introduction means no advocacy, and no advocacy means continued inaction.

Compromising with Yourself: How Big Ideas Get Buried Before Debate

There’s a third dysfunction that flows directly from the first two, and it may be the most damaging of all: members and advocates are forced to negotiate against themselves before a single public debate has occurred.

When you know a bill must survive ten rounds of pre-introduction review, you start making concessions in the first draft that you would never make in an actual negotiation. You drop the most ambitious provisions to avoid triggering a veto from a committee staffer. You soften the scope to preempt a leadership objection. You narrow the eligibility criteria to avoid a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that might make someone uncomfortable. By the time the bill is “ready” for introduction — if it ever is — it’s been stripped of the very ambition that made it worth writing.

Big ideas don’t get to be big ideas. They get incrementalized into timidity before anyone has even had the chance to argue for them publicly.

This is how transformative policy becomes impossible. We have seen it in action:

• The Child Tax Credit that leaves out the lowest-income families.

• The health coverage bill that doesn’t move us toward the goal of covering all kids.

• The child care investment that’s a fraction of the size it needs to be.

These aren’t always the result of Congress voting down good ideas. Often, the good ideas were never introduced in the first place — or introduced only after being whittled down so far that their impact was blunted before the debate even started.

Good policy needs the oxygen of public debate.

Children Have the Public. They Don’t Have the Power.

Here’s the cruel irony at the center of all of this: children are enormously popular.

Poll after poll shows that the American public strongly supports investing in children — in child care, in education, in children’s health care, in nutrition programs, and in support for family-friendly policies. They are among the most consistently popular policy ideas in American politics, crossing partisan lines.

And yet children are routinely ignored, deprioritized, or sacrificed in the backroom deals that actually drive congressional action.

Why? Because children don’t vote. They don’t have PACs. They don’t have bundlers. They don’t have well-heeled lobbyists with relationships going back decades. They can’t threaten to fund a primary challenge or pull an endorsement.

And in a Congress that increasingly runs on transactional power — where legislation moves when the right combination of money and pressure aligns — children bring none of the currency needed to get things done.

Washington works for those who can afford it. The insurance industry has lobbyists. The financial sector has lobbyists. Even the most obscure trade association has lobbyists. Children do not.

When President Barack Obama was working with Congress to pass the Affordable Care Act, the insurance and hospital industries urged eliminating the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). They wanted the millions of children served by CHIP to be moved to help lower the average cost of insurance in the exchanges.

Even though it would have left millions of children worse off, the House voted to abolish CHIP to move kids to the insurance exchanges. Insurance companies and hospitals had more political clout than children.

Fortunately, in a Senate Finance Committee mark-up, Sens. John Rockefeller (D-WV) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) teamed up to offer a successful bipartisan amendment to save CHIP’s superior health coverage for millions of children.

It succeeded precisely because it happened in public – on the record, in markup, where the political cost of voting against children would have been visible to everyone.

The opposite is also true.

When the Administration restructured the childhood immunization schedule by circumventing the normal process in order to slash vaccines that have protected children for decades, it did so through executive action, behind closed doors, with no congressional vote, no public hearing, and no opportunity for pediatricians, parents, or child health advocates to weigh in. That is not an accident.

Changes that would never survive public scrutiny don’t get made in public. The backroom is where children lose ground on issues the public didn’t even know were at risk.

This dynamic has a name in political science. Scholars Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram have carefully studied how governments allocate benefits and burdens – known as “social construction” – based on various groups’ perceived “power” and “deservingness.”¹ The social construction of children as innocent and deserving generates sympathy – but sympathy without power produces political promises but not action in backrooms, where more politically powerful groups are the big winners.

However, in public settings, those viewed as more “deserving,” such as children, often receive more favorable outcomes because political leaders have to appear compassionate toward dependents. Politicians may not wish to spend money or political capital on children, but it is another thing to be seen as harming them. The result, Schneider and Ingram find, is that benefits provided to dependents tend to be small but widely proclaimed, whereas burdens tend to be more of omission than commission.

That is what child advocates see time and time again.

Schneider and Ingram call this cumulative pattern “degenerative democracy” – a system in which the powerful consistently gain and the powerless consistently lose, and where self-correcting mechanisms grow too weak to push back. Children are among its most predictable casualties: popular enough to invoke a floor speech, powerful enough to ignore in a backroom deal.

Children often lose not through dramatic votes against them, but through quiet neglect — deals made behind closed doors, programs zeroed out in budget reconciliation packages nobody can amend, and needs simply never addressed because there’s no political cost to ignoring them.

And critically, children tend to do better when policy is made in public — when hearings are held, when advocates can testify, when constituents can see how their representatives vote.

The backroom is where children lose. Sunlight is where they have a fighting chance.

For example, the Jeffrey Epstein transparency bill – blocked for months by congressional leadership – was brought to the floor by a discharge petition and passed with just one dissenting vote.

The will exists for children. The public support exists. What’s missing is a Congress that functions and works with transparency.

What Would It Take: 12 Reforms That Would Actually Help

Wallner and Dayton offer one important insight for those of us who care about children: the path to a functioning Congress runs not through bypassing existing institutions, but through rebuilding the internal organization that gives rank-and-file members more power to deliberate and legislate. They argue that factions — organized groups of members with shared interests and shared staff capacity — are among the few tools available, within existing rules and incentives, to address that failure, by reallocating leverage horizontally, among rank-and-file lawmakers, by coordinating action at predictable moments in the legislative process.

For children’s advocates, this is a practical argument, not just a theoretical one. Building and strengthening a robust Congressional Children’s Caucus — with real legislative infrastructure, shared staff capacity, and the organizational discipline to act collectively at key moments — isn’t symbolic. It’s structural. It is precisely the kind of internal organization that can push back against the gatekeeping and gridlock that keep children’s bills from ever seeing daylight.

But caucuses alone won’t fix the deeper problems. Here are other reforms that would improve Congress’s function:

Fix the Permission Structure. Members should be able to introduce legislation without having to run it through layers of staff approval. Strengthen the discharge petition process so that bills with genuine majority support can reach the floor even when leadership objects. Make the obstruction visible and accountable. And make it all public. Right now, obstruction in both the House and Senate is invisible, which is precisely what makes it so effective against constituencies like children who depend on public accountability to protect them.

End Pre-Introduction Gatekeeping. Committee staff should not have the power to prevent the introduction of legislation by rank-and-file members. The right moment for committee review is during the committee process — not before a bill is even introduced. Restore the expectation that introduction is the beginning of legislative deliberation, not its conclusion.

Reward Bipartisanship. When Sen. Graham joined the Senate Finance Committee, members were told directly that bipartisan bills would receive priority. That spirit needs to be restored. Committees should create explicit incentives for cross-party collaboration and remove the implicit punishment for it.

Restore Regular Order in the Legislative Process. Congress has essentially abandoned the regular appropriations process in favor of omnibus bills and continuing resolutions crafted entirely by leadership, with almost no input from rank-and-file members. This is the budgetary version of “Mother May I?”, and children pay the price when funding decisions for Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and education are buried in thousand-page documents assembled behind closed doors and rushed to the floor without debate.

Returning to a functioning, committee-driven process — with individual bills debated in public — would expose children’s funding choices to the sunlight where, as Schneider and Ingram remind us, they tend to fare far better.

Reassert the Power of the Purse — For Children. One of the most alarming features of the current moment is the Administration’s willingness to impound, freeze, and redirect funds that Congress has already appropriated. As a Princeton School of Public and International Affairs report concluded, Congress must reassert its power over government spending by requiring greater transparency around apportionments, expenditures made during government shutdowns, and the transfer and reprogramming of federal funds. For children’s programs specifically, this means strengthening impoundment controls so that a president cannot unilaterally freeze Medicaid funding, Head Start grants, or child care and education dollars that Congress has already voted to spend.

The power of the purse is a children’s issue, and Congress has largely abandoned it.

Require Child Impact Statements. Just as environmental policy requires formal impact assessments before major federal actions, Congress should require child impact statements on major legislation and budget proposals. This reform strikes directly at the heart of the Schneider and Ingram problem: it forces the quiet costs imposed on children — through omission, through cuts, through reorganization — into public view, making it harder for organized abandonment to proceed unnoticed. When members of Congress and the public can see clearly what a bill does to children, the political calculus changes.

Strengthen the CBO’s Role on Children. CBO scores bills for their fiscal impact but does not systematically analyze their distributional impact by age. A formal requirement that major legislation include a CBO analysis showing who gains and who loses across generations — breaking out impacts on children specifically — would force the costs of children’s policy choices into the public ledger. Right now, cuts to Medicaid or nutrition assistance can be characterized in the aggregate without ever naming who bears the burden. An age-distributional analysis would make that evasion harder to sustain.

Campaign Finance Reform — For Children’s Sake. Until we reduce the power of concentrated money in politics, children will remain politically invisible. That means ending corporate PAC donations, capping dark money, expanding small-dollar public financing, and requiring full disclosure. Campaign finance reform is often discussed as a democracy issue, but it is also a children’s issue.

Children are the most popular constituency in America, with the least financial leverage in Washington. That gap is exacerbated by a campaign finance system that systematically amplifies the voices of those who can write checks and silences those who cannot.

Electoral Reform: Fix the Incentive Structure. Safe districts produced by partisan gerrymandering are one of the deepest structural drivers of the dysfunction described throughout this piece. When members face no meaningful general election threat, their only political risk comes from a primary, which means their incentive is to satisfy their base rather than govern broadly. Bipartisan cooperation on children’s legislation becomes not just unrewarded but actively dangerous. Independent redistricting commissions that take mapmaking out of the hands of party leaders would restore the electoral accountability that makes cross-party work possible.

As I’ve written previously, gerrymandering doesn’t just harm democracy — it harms children, by eliminating the competitive conditions under which members might be rewarded for prioritizing kids over party. Complementary reforms like ranked-choice voting and open primaries point in the same direction: rewarding candidates who build broad coalitions rather than those who simply mobilize the most intense slice of their base. In a Congress where children need bipartisan champions, anything that incentivizes broad appeal over ideological purity serves their interests.

Restore the House Select Committee on Children and Youth. The House had this Committee for decades. We need it again — a dedicated institutional space for investigating problems, advancing solutions, and forcing accountability on children’s issues across party lines. The Senate still maintains a Special Committee on Aging, recognizing the need for focused generational advocacy. Children deserve no less. In a Congress that often forgets kids entirely, a House Select Committee on Children and Youth would create a dedicated venue to investigate problems, promote solutions, and force accountability across both parties.

Restore “Children” to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. In 2023, the Senate HELP Committee quietly dropped “Children” from its Subcommittee on Children and Families. Subcommittee names are not merely symbolic — they signal legislative priorities. When “children” disappear from the name, children disappear from the agenda. Restore the name. Restore the focus.

Invest in Congressional Capacity. Congress has defunded itself over the years — fewer staff, weaker committee structures, less institutional knowledge. The result is a body less capable of writing thoughtful, cross-sector policy. Rebuilding that capacity, including through a dedicated Congressional Research Service (CRS) division on children’s policy, would give lawmakers the analytical tools they need to act effectively on behalf of kids. Members who want to do right by children should not have to fight the institution’s own infrastructure to do it.

I have listed 12 changes to help fix a broken Congress. What other reforms would be helpful?

Fix What’s Broken: For Self-Preservation, but More Importantly, for Children

When Congress fails to function, children disproportionately suffer from the inaction, obstruction, neglect, and silence. And when the backrooms replace the hearing rooms, when the powerful reliably gain and the powerless reliably lose — children are among the first and deepest casualties.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a system that rewards money, punishes bipartisanship, blocks introduction, and buries big ideas before they can be debated. A system that:

• Gives children sympathy, but not power.

• Makes promises, but fails to make investments.

• Delivers floor speeches, but not floor votes.

And here is the final irony: a Congress with 10% approval, that has made itself irrelevant through abdication and gridlock, that has surrendered its constitutional role to the Administration and its legislative role to leadership — that Congress could, tomorrow, choose to act on something the American public overwhelmingly supports. It could choose to act in support of children.

It’s time to fix what’s broken. It would cost them nothing politically. It would gain them everything in terms of public trust. The reforms described above are not radical — they are restorative. They ask Congress to do what it was designed to do: deliberate, legislate, and be accountable to the people it serves, including the youngest ones.

Kids can’t wait.

ENDNOTES

1. Schneider, A. L., & Ingram, H. M. (2019, May). Social Constructions, Anticipatory Feedback Strategies, and Deceptive Public Policy. Policy Studies Journal, 47(2), pp. 206-236; Schneider, A., & Ingram, H. (1993, Jun.). Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy. American Political Science Review, 87(2), 334-347; Ingram, H., Schneider, A. L., & DeLeon, P. (2007). Social Construction and Policy Design. In P. A. Sabatier, Theories of Policy Process. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.