Season 2, Episode 7 | Checks, Balances, and Budget Showdowns

This Constitution |  Season 2, Episode 7

Checks, Balances, and Budget Showdowns

The President can’t spend a dime without Congress. But how often does Congress actually say no?

In this episode, hosts Savannah Eccles Johnston and Matthew Brogdon examine the constitutional power of the purse and how budget appropriations and oversight give Congress a critical check on the presidency. From historical roots in the British monarchy to today’s broken appropriations process, they unpack how Congress’s power to control money—and monitor how it’s spent—shapes our modern government.

They also explore the decline of meaningful oversight, the rise of political theater, and why the legislative branch struggles to rein in a powerful executive. From Defense Department spending to GAO reports no one reads, this episode dives into how Congress could reclaim its institutional strength… if it wanted to.

In This Episode

• (00:00:00) Introduction to oversight and budgets
• (00:00:51) The power of the purse—Congress controls spending
• (00:02:12) Stopgaps, omnibus bills, and budget dysfunction
• (00:03:31) Tinkering with executive budget requests
• (00:04:25) FDR and the rise of presidential budgeting
• (00:06:17) Congressional restraint and presidential discretion
• (00:06:44) Why Congress won’t cut war spending
• (00:09:32) Standing armies and shifting public sentiment
• (00:11:05) Can presidents impound money Congress appropriates?
• (00:13:25) The Impoundment Control Act
• (00:14:42) Appropriations vs. expenditures—who writes the check?
• (00:18:03) How Congress uses budgets to shape foreign policy
• (00:20:34) Oversight as a check on executive agencies
• (00:22:32) The promise (and failure) of congressional oversight
• (00:24:28) Oversight vs. journalism—what’s Congress’s role?
• (00:26:42) Theater vs. actual oversight behind the scenes
• (00:28:56) Committees, staffing, and the hollowing of Congress
• (00:34:10) Losing institutional knowledge in public service
• (00:36:15) How to fix it—pay, staffing, and retention

Notable Quotes

• [00:04:25] “Without that constitutional requirement, you would see the complete collapse of the checks and balances system in favor of just presidential dictatorship.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
• [00:07:49] “You don’t want to be seen as the Congress who cuts the budget for the Defense Department.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
• [00:13:25] “The President doesn’t get that kind of discretion—though they’ve created a method by which he could if he needed to.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
• [00:20:34] “Not only does Congress fund agencies—they also get to ask: ‘Do you suck at your job?’” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
• [00:25:52] “Congress is trying to go viral on YouTube instead of doing oversight.” — Matthew Brogdon
• [00:33:32] “Budgets and oversight have been hollowed out. But if Congress reclaimed regular order and institutional thinking, it could pull power back from the presidency.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston

Transcript

[00:00:00] Intro: We the people, do ordain and establish this constitution. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[0:03 – 0:13]:

Welcome to This Constitution. My name is Savannah Eccles Johnston.

Matthew Brogdon

[0:13 – 0:15]:

And I'm Matthew Brogdon.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[0:15 – 0:51]:

And today we are going to talk about maybe a lesser known checks and balance in the US Constitution, which is oversight and budgets, and how Congress can use oversight and budgets to construct policy and to rein in the executive. So first we need to talk about the power of the purse. So Congress alone controls the money in this government. We don't think about that today. Today we think about the President's budget being submitted to Congress. But historically, that's not how it works. It's Congress that controls the budget. Why is that significant in this checks and balances system?

Matthew Brogdon

[0:51 – 1:51]:

Well, I think the historical counterexamples are pretty important, which is the framers are looking at English examples where the Crown was able to draw revenue from the Treasury as he wished. The King couldn't raise taxes, but the King could spend anything that was in the treasury and borrow money. So it's really critically important that the President is not supposed to be able to borrow money or spend money unless it's pursuant to an appropriation by Congress. Actually, a provision of the Constitution says no money can be drawn from the Treasury, but by appropriation, by law. So that means Congress has got to specify when the money's going to be spent. So that's quite a stark contrast to the situation where the British Crown could get Parliament to raise taxes, sort of send Parliament home, and then go wage a war with whatever war chest was sitting in the Treasury, and borrow more money to replenish it. The US Constitution makes that theoretically impossible.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[1:52 – 2:12]:

Right. So how that operates in practice is that Congress has to pass 12 appropriations bills a year, basically funding the US government. Now, they don't do that very successfully anymore, but that's the idea is you pass 12 appropriations bills a year, and the President cannot do anything without those appropriations from Congress.

Matthew Brogdon

[2:12 – 2:13]:

So what are we doing instead?

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[2:14 – 2:21]:

Oh, well, currently we're doing a lot of stopgap funding. That's what we're doing right now. We do big omnibus bills.

Matthew Brogdon

[2:21 – 2:30]:

All right. This is like the, you know, in the family budget, when you're like, well, we had a budget, but on the other hand, we'll just transfer some money out of savings this month to cover it and figure it out next month.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[2:30 – 2:40]:

Yeah, this is okay. Yeah, basically. Or we can't agree on a budget. We might get a divorce over it. So instead we'll just continue funding from the previous marriage cycle, just keep spending.

Matthew Brogdon

[2:40 – 2:41]:

Until the card gets declined.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[2:41 – 2:47]:

Yeah. No, really, though? Or you give yourself two more months to fight over it and then you push it down the road again.

Matthew Brogdon 

[2:47 - 2:50]: 

That's kind of how we're hilarious and terrible. Terrifying. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[2:50 – 3:31]: 

It is terrifying. But I don't think we realize that this is how it works. Every year, the President submits a budget to Congress, requesting certain levels of funding for all the various executive departments and Congress. This is very useful, actually. They actually requested that the President do this during the FDR years because it helps to know what the level should be. But they don't actually have to follow this at all and involve a lot of tinkering. They ignore good chunks of it sometimes. For example, DOD will request, we want these weapons, these weapons and these weapons. We don't really need money for those weapons anymore. And Congress will take this and say, yeah, but that weapon's made in my district.

Matthew Brogdon 

[3:31 – 3:32]: 

That's right.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[3:32 – 3:36]: 

And we'll say, actually, you don't need the new stuff. We're just going to fund the old stuff.

Matthew Brogdon 

[3:36 – 3:43]: 

That's right. Eastern Shipbuilding is in my hometown in Florida. And, yeah, I think Coast Guard cutters should be built there and we should make more of them.

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[3:46 – 4:04]: 

So the President doesn't get his way in the budget. Even, you know, 80 % of the time, Congress comes in really tinkers. It just provides a baseline for Congress. But I think this is very important to understand because the President's hands are much more tied than we think, especially on things like war.

Matthew Brogdon 

[4:05 – 4:08]: 

Well, can I actually back up the fact that the President proposes a budget?

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[4:08 – 4:09]: 

Oh, yes.

Matthew Brogdon 

[4:09 – 4:09]: 

Yeah.

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[4:09 – 4:09]: 

Yeah.

Matthew Brogdon 

[4:09 – 5:25]: 

Because this seems important. I mean, FDR started doing this in a period when the presidency was claiming the President had become the leader, a new national party coalition. So the President is the voice of this new Democratic Party that's got people in it who didn't vote for Democrats before and stuff. And it seems to me those two things go together. FDR sort of saying, I'm going to propose to Congress what the budget should look like. Because as one of my mentors liked to say, whenever he would justify the President being in the driver's seat on the budget process and say, look, insofar as we have a national conversation about our priorities as a country, it happens whenever we're putting the budget together. And in some ways, if the President is actually sort of at the head of the prevailing or winning party coalition, then it makes some sense for that person to sort of put together the first draft, right — the Virginia Plan, so to speak — of the national budget, so that Congress can then pull it apart and do all these pluralistic things representing their particular districts in different parts of the country, but you at least get a sort of first draft that's based on a comprehensive view of the national interest.

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[5:25 – 6:17]: 

Yeah, well, that's very well said. But also I think it's very useful that it's Congress that still ultimately controls the construction of the budget, because without that constitutional requirement, I think you would see the complete collapse of the checks-and-balances system in favor of just presidential dictatorship, basically. Especially because during those FDR years, you're right, you have this explosive growth in the power of the presidency, the construction of the modern presidency, which has never abated. But that is the one thing that is kept out of the President's hands. He can claim to represent the American people, to speak for the national interest, but in the end he is still subject to the decision of 535 members of Congress. And I think that's quite useful. So in that sense, it's actually the budget that is the last great thing that Congress has over the President's head. 

Matthew Brogdon

[6:17 – 6:41]

Yeah, I mean, the trick is when you have a President who gets all of this initiative, right, has the ability to initiate priorities and initiate the discussion, how do you keep Congress’s hand firmly on the purse strings so that the money’s not actually flowing out until Congress has come along and agreed? And that’s, I think that’s the problem we’ve got to work out somehow.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[6:41 – 7:49]

And it turns out it’s actually much harder to say no to the President on spending money on certain topics than it is on other topics. So, for example, war. It is so rare in our history that Congress will say no to basically war appropriations because you don’t want to be seen as the Congress that doesn’t support the troops. And so although the budget is a great way to direct war-making and foreign policy, they’re loath to actually use that power. The President almost always wins in foreign policy and war-making because he can say, “I’m Commander in Chief, I’m standing for the troops. Who are you to cut off funding?” They’ve only done this a couple of times. At the end of the Vietnam War is an example. They begin to really restrict the flow of monies going into Southeast Asia. But other than that, they don’t do it. So Presidents can really get away with it at least. One of the reasons why the Pentagon’s budget keeps getting bigger is you don’t want to be seen as the Congress who cuts the budget for the Defense Department. So, I mean, over half of the trillion dollars Congress will appropriate every year will go to that one thing.

Matthew Brogdon

[7:49 – 9:32]

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that—I guess the other side of the two-edged sword on having a standing army in a republic. We talked about this a little bit last season, I think, about the place of the military when we talked about war powers. And if we were operating in Great Britain before the American founding, the military and military power would just be a sort of pawn, so to speak, between king and parliament. But it’s different in the American republic because we don’t see the army as some sort of separate class of people, which at the time of the American founding, you know, standing armies were sort of full of conscripted troops and prisoners, foreigners, all sorts of things. So the population did not feel any affinity for the military or members of the military. And that’s changed dramatically in a republic. Now we have a volunteer army that is seen as a part of the citizenry and an important part of it, a part of it that we sort of hold in high esteem. I actually think a lot of the founders did not anticipate this happening with a standing army in a republic, but it has happened. And one of the interesting political consequences of that is that this now becomes a really hefty bargaining chip for whoever wants military action, which is often the President. It doesn’t have to be—Congress has been the belligerent institution from time to time—in the War of 1812—can always argue like, well, we can’t defund that, or we can’t scale back because you won’t be supporting the troops.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[9:32 – 9:32]

Right.

Matthew Brogdon

[9:32 – 9:59]

And the fact that that’s a sort of patriotic appeal that people are very sympathetic to is something that the founders did not anticipate or experience because that was not the way the military was looked at in their age. And now it’s become this incredibly powerful source of rhetorical influence for the presidency that translates into real power over funding.

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[9:59 – 11:05]

Oh, it does, well. And this takes us back to the way that the Antifederalists haunt us. The Antifederalists were right about a lot of particular things—the power of the judiciary, potentially; concerns, the standing army. They were wrong on the big thing, the U.S. Constitution. But their small critiques really haunt us. And a lot of Hamilton’s responses to these critiques, such as “Don’t worry about the judiciary; they’ll be the least dangerous branch, they have neither force nor will,” and “Don’t worry about standing armies,” kind of ring hollow 200 years on—kind of at least not completely correct. And I kind of like that for the Antifederalists; they still kind of get the last word. But we need to go back to budgets. So let’s flip the script here. We know that the President cannot spend money without appropriations from Congress. Okay, but what if Congress appropriates funds and then the President says, nah, I’m not going to spend that money? If he puts a hold on—if he impounds that money, refuses to spend it for the purposes that Congress has appropriated it for—is this a constitutional power?

Matthew Brogdon 

[11:05 - 13:25]: 

Well, the interesting thing is in a Constitution that says a lot of very specific things about money and how it gets raised in taxes, how it gets spent in terms of the appropriations process, time limits and all sorts of things, it is conspicuously silent on the question of whether the President can decline to spend the money. Now actually, this boils down to a really important question which is is this the President refusing to enforce a law that would be a power to suspend laws? Which actually was quite. The framers of the Constitution would have thought that was quite inimical. And they aimed, you know, the provision that says in Article 2, the President shall faithfully execute the laws was aimed at the monarchical power to suspend the laws. Right to say, I'm just not going to enforce this law. But is an appropriation really like a law? Is it like when Congress says this is illegal and people may not do it and the President says I'm not going to enforce that, that's clearly suspending a law. But if Congress says we want you to spend X amount of money building new Coast Guard cutters and the President says we don't actually need that many new Coast Guard cutters, I'm only going to build half that many. Is that the same thing as refusing to enforce a criminal statute? And I think it does sort of come down to that. Because if it's a form of suspending the laws, then it's very constitutionally suspect may run a foul of faithful execution. If appropriations are something different, Congress specifying how the money gets spent is something else. Then I think there's an argument for the President as an aspect of the executive power to say, well, you appropriated these funds, it turns out that's too much, don't need to spend this much. That doesn't seem unreasonable on its face for any executive to say, you appropriated these monies last year, circumstances changed, it doesn't make sense to spend that much. Or we, I guess, as George Bush would have said, mis overestimated or something. The amount that we need to spend and so decline to do so. That doesn't seem shocking or a transgression at any clear constitutional limit. But we'd have to get down into details. I don't know if you can answer that question in the abstract. I actually think you have to think a little bit about the details. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[13:25 - 14:28]: 

The Supreme Court seems to disagree with this though, that impoundments are a clear violation of the power of the purse, that since the Constitution grants Congress and Congress alone the power to appropriate money, the President doesn't get to decide whether or not to spend that money or how else that money should be spent. Which is why Congress actually has created a method by which Presidents can say, actually you've appropriated too much. We don't need that much. It's called the Impoundment Control Act. And there's a very specific procedure here. The President submits, puts a 45 day pause, submits a request to Congress, basically, will you review this? Basically double check your work. You're spending too much on Coast Guard cutters. And Congress can then decide to approve that request for impoundment. If they don't, the President has to release those funds and spend the funds how Congress has told them to. So this is the process for impoundments in this country. And I actually like that this is the process. I want the power of the purse kept solely in the hands of Congress. They have so little left to them. The President doesn't get that kind of discretion, though they've created a method by which he could if he needed to. 

Matthew Brogdon

[14:28 - 14:33]: 

Sure, yeah. I mean, the Impoundment Control act is a recognition of this necessity, I think. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[14:34 - 14:42]: 

Of the necessity, but not the constitutional leeway. Basically they're saying it doesn't exist constitutionally. So we're going to create this little route and I think that's important. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[14:42 - 17:03]: 

Well, I have two questions on this. One is, can you draw a line between appropriations and spending? Which the Constitution does seem to do and that provision actually saying no money shall be issued from the treasury, but by appropriation by law, meaning you can't spend unless the funds are appropriated That makes appropriation and spending two different things. Right. The President does control the Treasury. Congress decides what can come out of it, but it's ultimately the President who writes the check actually spends the funds. So budgeting and expenditure are two different functions and the expenditure is part of the executive function. So you could argue for a little more discretion there. And I think the second thing that might actually buttress that view is the form of appropriation that Congress chooses. I think it matters. So we've been talking about, you know, Congress says build seven Coast Guard cutters. Actually, this is a good example. In the 1790s, Congress said, here's an amount of money to build new frigates for the US Navy. Congress didn't specify the number of frigates. President decided, okay, we're going to build five. Like the US Constitution sitting in Boston harbor is one of these there? Congress is basically setting a ceiling like, we want this objective achieved. We need a navy, we need some more warships. Here's a sum of money you can spend on that. You figure out what boats you need and build them. And the President did not necessarily have to exhaust those funds if he said, well, we only need four, so I'm going to spend 80% of the money. So I think it does matter if Congress leaves executive discretion in the expenditure by making it incredibly general. I mean, if they appropriate a sum of money and say, use this money to achieve this general purpose, that is starkly different from Congress saying we need a more powerful Navy build. And I don't know all of them. I was reading an article the other day by some military policy person that was using all sorts of acronyms that I don't understand. But Congress says we actually need four more of these ships. Here's the money to build them. That seems like a very specific appropriation and therefore binds the President. When Congress is vague in its appropriation and identifies general ends and then leaves executive discretion necessarily to decide how that's met. I don't think an attendant requirement is to spend every penny. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [17:03 - 17:06]: 

Oh, I agree. And we're actually in agreement on this.

Matthew Brogdon 

[17:07 - 18:03]: 

But most federal appropriations look like that now, don't they? I don't know if I have an empirical basis for this claim, but I suspect this is actually why DOGE went after grant funds. Because grant programs are like this, right? When you establish a grant program and say somebody in the National Endowment for the Arts has this pool of money, they can spend it on projects like this. That's exactly like this sort of, here's a pot of money to do a general thing with the executive branch. You go decide who gets the money. This is one of the reasons that I think the government efficiency has gone after the grants first, because this is exactly how grant programs work in a sense. They are these sorts of general appropriations where you leave executive discretion. So it may be fact, it may be contingent on the facts of whatever we're dealing with in terms of the appropriation. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[18:03 - 22:23]: 

Well, agreed, but the big question is, can a President refuse to spend money that has been specifically appropriated for a thing? So this is actually one of the ways that Congress can control foreign policy creation in this country. Every cycle, they need to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA. And by the way, the year you stop seeing the NDAA be passed is the year you can know Congress is broken. This is the bipartisan bill. This is the one they always get done because Congress doesn't want to be seen as failing to provide for the national defense. But this is an incredibly long bill, and it's very detailed. And it's not just, here's a trillion dollars for this. It's here's a very specific amount of money to do X in this country or to fund Y in that country. It's a very specific bill. And they're actually shaping the executive branch's capacity to conduct foreign policy based on what they can spend that money on and how they spend it. It's this wonderful control mechanism. And actually, the NDAA doesn't actually authorize any of the spending. They just kind of create the framework. But it's a tool. And without the budget power, Congress lacks that tool, that kind of soft power tool over foreign policy. So there's an example of why the budget has to stay exclusively in the hands of Congress. But this leads us to part two of this episode. And it's kind of funny that we put these together, actually. They could each be their own entire episode. And it's an oversight. So not only does Congress get to create agencies and fund those agencies and determine how every dollar in this government is spent, they also get to conduct oversight of the executive branch to basically say, are you doing what we told you to do? Are you using the money that we appropriated to you and the way that we told you to use it? Should we keep funding you? Do you suck at your job? All this kind of stuff. And it is, next to the budgets, maybe the most important power of Congress, the ability to conduct oversight. So here's an example of how this can work. So during the appropriations cycle, when I was working in the Senate as an APSA fellow, we had the Department of Justice come in to beg for money. That's what they do. It's kind of an act of humiliation on the part of the executive branches. They have to come in and beg senators and members of the House for money. And you have these senators sitting up on the dais and they are looking down at you and asking you mean, nasty questions that are mostly just statements about how bad you are at your job. And you just have to sit there and take it and then say, but can you please keep funding us? And here's why we need more for this or more for that. And it's this wonderful public display of Democratic control over the executive branches. Even just something as simple as Merrick Garland being told, will you please speak up? You're too quiet. It's just an act of public humiliation. The problem is Congress kind of sucks at oversight these days. And at least part of the reason is Congress does not have the staff to properly conduct oversight, to know if every one of these Alphabet soup agencies is using the money that they've appropriated to them the way they told them to do it, and if they are actually accomplishing the goals for which they were created, it's too big of a job. Congress can't effectively do it. And at least part of the answer is you need to triple the staff of Congress solely for oversight. So one last anecdote of this. The Government Accountability Office, a fantastic body that goes in and reviews every agency in this government, and then they turn in hundreds of pages of reports to Congress every single year. And with the rare exception, like a report that just came out from the GAO on how bad our shipbuilding is, that actually made its way in to Trump's joint address to Congress in this March, outside of that rare example, no one's reading this stuff because no one has time, no staffer has time to read a new report from the GAO about how some agency is misusing his funds or is having X, Y or Z problems, and therefore they lack the knowledge to conduct oversight in one of. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[22:23 - 22:32]: 

These hearings, that seems like a compelling case. But one could also argue that Congress's preoccupation with oversight is a distraction. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[22:32 - 22:33]: 

Oh, my goodness. Okay. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [22:34 - 24:00]: 

We have a responsible, elected chief executive who's responsible for the executive branch. If the executive branch is not operating in a way that uses the resources responsibly that Congress has provided, that secures the public interest in an appropriate way, the President's responsible for that. And we hold the president and his party electorally accountable for that kind of irresponsibility. You could argue that this is sort of trying to use Congress to fill up the defect of executive responsibility somehow, or I'll tackle this a different way, too. Which is the problem? Potential problem with oversight, or at least some of it has to do with its aim. So if Congress is conducting oversight hearings, right. Department of Justice. If Congress's purpose in doing that is to figure out what should we appropriate next year or what law should we pass based on how our current laws are performing that's connected to a legislative purpose? Congress's appropriation function and Congress's regulatory function sounds great. I suspect that an awful lot of those hearings are not concerned with either one of those things. The hearings are concerned with giving people a platform and as public as possible with a TV camera in the room to make political criticisms of office holders and embarrass people in public. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[24:00 - 24:01]: 

Oh, definitely. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[24:01 - 24:27]: 

So it does not seem to me to help us write better laws or make better appropriations. In fact, where that conversation could usefully be had would be like a conversation between Justice Department staff and congressional staff without a television camera in the room to find out, like, how is this working? What kinds of reforms do we need? How could we improve our laws? What are all great conversations? No one can have a serious conversation about that in front of a TV camera in Congress. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[24:28 - 24:54]: 

Well, goodness, I agree with you, but I think we're kind of missing the point here. We're talking about legislative functions, right? Creating new laws. But this is a season about checks and balances. One of the most effective ways to check against the growth of the power of the presidency is oversight of the presidency. Now, you could say we hold the President accountable for all of this, but you don't actually know how he's doing his job unless you conduct oversight of the various departments and hold them. 

Matthew Brogdon

[24:54 - 25:36]:

But I thought this was the job of a free press, actually. Oh, that's supposed to go find out what in the world the government is doing and inform us about it. The public. Congress's job is to stick to its knitting, figure out how money is being spent, what laws we need, and to deliberate on them. And I think that's better done in private, actually, than done out in the public square. And we rely on a free press to tell us when the government's abusing things and misspending funds and all that stuff so that we can then it put punish the president politically in his party. And I think Congress has put itself in the place of journalists, basically. Like they're supposed to go root out wrongdoing the executive branch and inform the American people about it. That is not what Congress is there to do. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[25:37 - 25:43]: 

Well, it's not simply rooting out wrongdoing, in which case they really are just journalists. That's not what's happening here. 

Matthew Brogdon

[25:43 - 25:52]: 

I watched a few congressional hearings this year, and that is exactly what they're doing. Like, how can I drag the people I don't like in front of this committee and embarrass them? 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[25:52 - 26:44]:

Oh, no, a hundred percent. It's a theater. Hearings are theater. But so much of the important oversight isn't happening in hearings. It's happening behind the scenes as you construct budgets, for example. And you say things like, here's how we appropriated funds last time, here's how they used it. They're not effective at their job, or they're using it for this, this or that. And so we're gonna rein them in. We're gonna make them follow the law the way that we want them to follow the law. They found this loophole. They found that loophole. Turns out this whole department sucks. We're going to get rid of it. That's an oversight. And that's an important checks and balance, especially in a modern system where we think that the President has way more powers than the President has. And you have this massive bureaucracy mostly under the control of the President. This is one of the few ways Congress can drag back power from the President. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[26:44 - 27:36]:

I think I'm very interested in. I have anecdotal interactions with congressional staff and members of Congress in terms of how they spend their time and what frustrates them. But I would love to see some more systematic interviews, somebody talking with members of Congress and their staff to see how much of your time is actually consumed preparing for this public theater, for the theatrical performances and the platforming that goes on versus how much time are you actually spending looking at GAO reports, talking to your fellow members of Congress behind closed doors, discussing things with members of the executive branch, or knowledgeable about what's going on so that you can actually make policy. And my suspicion is, especially for the members, awful lot of their time is consumed preparing for the theater. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[27:36 - 27:49]: 

Well, so first of all, we're thinking oversight is just hearings. That's no, oversight is also reading the GAO reports. It is constructing new laws. Oversight is everything Congress does in some substantial sense. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[27:49 - 27:52]: 

I don't think they have time for that unless they stop doing the theater. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [27:53 - 28:00]:

 I agree. Get rid of public hearings. No one disagrees with that. Right. The only people who disagree are the people who are trying to go viral on YouTube or something. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[28:00 - 28:05]: 

Do they? Because if I say in public, get rid of the cameras in Congress, well. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[28:05 - 28:52]: 

It would look anti Democratic. So people would go against it, but in secret, I think they would tell you, yeah, it's theater. Nothing happens in these. And they don't prepare nearly as much as you think for those. So, for example, if I was taking the senator I worked for to an appropriations hearing with the Department of Justice, I would give Him a binder on the way there with the questions he's going to ask. He hasn't seen it before that moment. He's going to read the questions on the walk to the committee room, and then he'll read them out and then he'll leave. That's as much involvement as he has in this. So maybe, you know, some staffers putting together these questions. But I would actually say that a lot more time is spent on creating new laws which never go anywhere and will never be passed by Congress. I mean, you're talking about thousands of laws that are created every single year that go nowhere. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [28:52 - 28:52]:

 Good. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [28:52 - 28:53]: 

That's. 

Matthew Brogdon [28:53 - 28:55]: 

Yeah, yeah, I want them to go nowhere. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [28:55 - 29:14]: 

So it's actually something I thought about a lot, is we were told, okay, what are his legislative priorities? The guy who ran the energy portfolio had left and they said, we want to create a law for weatherizing the grid. And I don't know the first thing about weatherizing the grid. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [29:14 - 29:17]: Well, I know if it freezes in Texas, the electricity goes off. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[29:18 - 29:19]: 

Right. That's why you want to weatherize it. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[29:19 - 29:20]: Yeah, sure. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[29:20 - 29:46]: 

So I met with the National Grid Engineers of America. They're just, they show up, they're very friendly, they help members of Congress learn how you're supposed to do this very technical thing. So I met with these guys, can you help me create a bill on this? And then it occurs to me there's probably 50 other bills being created on this same thing. Why do you need 100 different Senate offices creating just slightly different bills on a similar topic? 

Matthew Brogdon 

[29:46 - 29:53]: Don't. That's why you have committees, isn't it? Yeah, well, I thought the committee system did this. Oh, no, that's right. The committees are busy holding public hearings. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [29:53 - 30:08]:

 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The problem with committees isn't that they're busy holding hear with committees is that power has been sucked into the hands of leadership. The power of committees is that now bills are being passed almost by themselves by Senate majority leaders and House speakers. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [30:08 - 30:26]: Instead of through committees. I know Congress was last season, you know. Well, we talked about the presidency last season, some in Congress. But whenever we do talk about Congress. Yes, power needs to go back to committee leadership. It's just hands down, Congress operated best when committees were running the show. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[30:26 - 30:30]: Right. So you might not like the kind of laws coming out of the Senate. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[30:30 - 30:32]: Well, that's true. We didn't like some of the policies that came out. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[30:32 - 30:55]: 

Right. You might not like the policies coming out of the, out of Congress. But the fact of the matter is that they are creating laws almost compulsively. Like every new legislative staffer is writing laws and trying to get, you know, other members of the Senate to get on board and then submitting them to the clerk and then hoping they make it to committee and make it through the whole process of regular order, which isn't how things work today. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [30:55 - 31:20]: Great. Well, I'll draw a distinction. And we probably agree on this. We're fighting very, you know, we're being very energetic about something. We probably agree on more than we think. But the. I think that's where we can usefully draw a distinction between legislative activity and deliberation. Like, you could have a legislature, you know, bills being proposed all over the place. That is different from them deliberating. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [31:20 - 31:21]: 

Oh, agreed. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [31:21 - 31:21]: Right. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[31:21 - 31:22]:

 Yes. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[31:22 - 32:26]: So you only have the capacity to deliberate on a limited number of bills, and it does have to be controlled by a committee system, because all legislative bodies, all effective constitutional conventions require drafting committees. This is universal. Effective legislatures require committees to do the work. That's because you need group deliberation to capture the benefit of having multiple people in the room and perspectives. But you can't do it with 400 people at the same time. So you've got to do that. And right now, Congress, from. From the way the leadership is structured and the fact that power is central, actually, it's both centralized and decentralized. Individual members have way too much power, and leadership has way too much power. And what's hollowed out is the middle. And somehow if Congress wants to do effective oversight and it wants to do effective appropriations and it wants to do effective legislating all the things we wish it would do, then I think you've got to pull power back into committees, smaller groups that are in the middle, so that individual members can't be so obstructionist and difficult and derail things. And entrepreneurs. You can't have a thousand cooks in the kitchen. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[32:26 - 32:28]: 

Yeah. You can't have 100 senators. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[32:28 - 32:46]: 

Right. And you don't need this level of centralized leadership. It's not responsible. The speaker of the House and majority leaders are only responsible to one district or one state in the whole country. Why on earth should they be responsible for the country's legislative process? It makes no sense in terms of Republicanism. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [32:46 - 33:32]: 

Oh, I agree. Committees. We need power back in committees. This is a regular order. I like regular order. A lot of. And a key component of committees is not just legislation. It is an effective oversight. Both of these things together. Equal deliberation, equal checks and balances, equals pulling back power from the presidency, all of which I like. So we agree, budgets oversight are important powers of the legislature. They've been hollowed out recently by partisanship, by the hollowing out of committees. And they could do it better if you pulled power back to the committees, reestablish regular order and get Congress to think institutionally and less as members of a certain political party beholden to a president. 

Matthew Brogdon

[33:32 - 33:36]: 

And you said we're going to have to triple the size of congressional staff. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[33:36 - 33:41]: 

Well, too. Also triple the size of congressional staff and pay them a whole bunch more. Yes. So they stopped going and working for Google instead. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[33:41 - 34:10]:

On the whole, this is not a popular view, but we underpay public servants tremendously. And some of them, we not only underpay them compared to what they could easily make in the private market, but then we prohibit them from finding other sources of income. This frustrates me about federal judges. Actually, we more or less just prohibit them from finding alternative sources of income. And then we don't pay them a third of what their peers make, which seems to me disproportionate. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

[34:10 - 34:27]: 

Can I end with an anecdote on this about why we should pay public servants more? The best public servant I've ever met was the legislative director in the Senate office that I worked in. She'd been working on Capitol Hill for 26 years. Something like that. During this entire time she'd be raised. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[34:27 - 34:28]: 

She was living in a box. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[34:28 - 35:49]: 

Yeah, well, it's amazing. Her husband worked for the State Department. So neither of them are bringing in a Buku box and they have two daughters and both of them are working until like 8pm every night. No vacations, getting paid, nothing. And by the time she made it through January 6th Covid and just hyper partisanship, she was just kind of broken. And she decided now's the moment. Now that I have 26 years of legislative experience, by the way, she was a fairly nonpartisan person, which was kind of remarkable for the Hill. She was just deeply expert in crafting the law. She decided I am done with this. And she went to the private sector. Good for her. And probably tripled her salary and more than tripled her vacation time and is working way less now. She can afford to send her daughters to college. She gets to see them now that they're teenagers and almost out of the house. And how unfortunate is it that we pushed her to that point? That's the person you don't want to lose. You don't want that person going away because who's going to replace her is some new. Well, she's a legislative director but some new legislative assistant who hasn't been there very long, who's making just poverty level amounts of money, probably getting assistance from their parents to be able to do this job and lacks the institutional expertise. 

Matthew Brogdon

 [35:49 - 36:08]: 

I mean, honestly, if I had my way, I would make a lot of government employment better compensated and less permanent and make it more competitive. Government employment should be more competitive. It should have better competitive wages so that you attract competent people, but the ability to fire them whenever they do a crappy job. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[36:08 - 36:09]: 

Oh, agreed on firing. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[36:10 - 36:15]: 

And you know, that would be, that would be a just net gain all the way around. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[36:15 - 36:16]: 

Right. 

Matthew Brogdon

[36:16 - 36:17]: 

In terms of public service. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [36:17 - 36:23]: 

But you don't want to lose institutional knowledge. And it's very, very difficult to gain institutional knowledge. So you retain them. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[36:23 - 36:29]: 

If people have influence and they're well compensated and they're having an impact, then you'll retain them. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [36:29 - 36:30]: 

Yeah. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[36:30 - 36:45]: 

This is how the rest of the world works. Outside of government employment. You don't have to forego all attractive opportunities to remain a public servant for a career. And at the same time, you're not stuck keeping the people who are content with the job. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[36:46 - 36:49]: 

Right? Well, I said that would be the anecdote that we ended on. Now we're just ranting. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[36:49 - 36:51]: 

Now we're ranting. Oh my goodness. 

Savannah Eccles Johnston 

[36:51 - 36:52]: 

So we'll leave it there. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[36:53 - 37:23]: 

Yeah. So budgets, Congress should have its hands on the purse strings, but we do have an executive that has to have adequate discretion to actually do the job in all these areas. And Congress has to exercise some kind of oversight of that at least. We can at least agree at the level of whatever's necessary for them to determine what should be appropriate next year and what laws do we need or what changes in reforms and laws do we need to actually govern effectively? 

Savannah Eccles Johnston

 [37:24 - 37:25]: 

Sure, we can agree on that basis. 

Matthew Brogdon 

[37:25 - 38:09]: 

The Constitution is more than parchment under glass at the National Archives. It's a blueprint for American self government that shapes every part of our civic life, from the rights we cherish to the laws we live under. We explore the ongoing battle over the meaning and relevance of America's founding document. This Constitution will equip you to engage the most pressing political questions of our time. Join us every two weeks as we hash out constitutional questions together. This podcast is ordained and established by the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, the home of Utah's Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative.