Republican lawmakers have admitted they got practically nothing done this year as President Donald Trump’s agenda stripped away their legislative output and dominated their work.
Just 38 bills were passed into law by Congress this year, in what is on record as the lowest legislative output for a first-year presidency in decades, The Washington Post reports.
The numbers are practically half the amount Congress accomplished during Trump’s first year in office in 2017, when 78 bills were passed. Under Joe Biden, 68 bills were passed in the first year of his presidency, while Obama’s administration signed off on 119 new laws in 2009.
“I guess we got the big, beautiful bill done,” GOP Rep. David Joyce told the Post. “Other than that, I really can’t point to much that we got accomplished.”
The reason for the slowdown, according to insiders, is Trump’s over-reliance on executive orders to advance his agenda, bypassing Congress and its razor-thin Republican majority wherever possible, as he has spent much of the year shifting power away from the legislative branch and towards the executive.
“He has signed every executive order he could possibly think of on this,” said Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who noted that Trump signed more executive orders this year than in the entirety of his first term.
“And there just comes a point at which it’s like, Congress sooner or later has to legislate. I mean, you can sign EOs, but he needs somebody to codify those,” he added.
In the Senate, around 60 percent of votes this year have been devoted to confirming Trump’s various nominees rather than approving legislation.
But not every member of Congress has been opposed to the president’s naked power grab. “We did what we said we would do. You know, the ’24 election was about securing the border, cutting taxes,” said MAGA Rep. Jim Jordan.
“Remember that great line he had in the joint address, when he said people said you needed a new law to secure the border. Turns out all you needed was a new president.”
The overwhelming feeling on The Hill, however, is that 2025 has been a flop for the Republican-controlled Congress, which is widely predicted to shed even more seats following next year’s midterm elections.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to shut down the government for a record-breaking 43 days in October and November has also been seen as a significant factor in the House’s failure to pass any meaningful legislation.
Johnson, however, defended the strategy, telling reporters, “It takes some time to implement new policies and root out the bad things, and that’s what’s happening.”
The Republicans’ strategy – or lack thereof – has also been seen as a major factor in Congress’s slowdown this year.
“We dropped the ball miserably by not doing something on health care all year long, knowing that the subsidy issue was going to be here at the end of the year,” Joyce added. “We didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
His words were echoed by Hawley, who added: “We need to lower the cost of health care, as quickly as possible, on every front … premiums, deductibles, out-of-pocket expenses. There’s a lot to do.”
