Congress is wrapping up the year in the shadow of the longest government shutdown and with a growing reputation as the least productive in modern history.
"Congress is in a coma. It has a pulse, but not many brainwaves," said former Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat who represented Tennessee for 32 years. "It's hard to tell that it's even alive as an institution."
A record number of lawmakers are calling it quits ahead of the midterm elections next year and are running for the Capitol exits, pursuing different offices or retiring from political life altogether.
While there's a temptation to look at a diminished House as a symptom of the first year of the second Trump administration, former members told NPR that legislative stagnation and low morale have been building for quite some time.
Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who serves as president of the Association of Former Members of Congress, said the issues are growing deeper.
"We've done studies showing the reason a lot of people are leaving is because it's not functional, because of death threats, because they're not getting anything done," she said in an interview.
"The polarization is just dramatically different from even from the 'good old days' when you had the Clinton impeachment, but you got things like welfare and tax reform done," said Comstock, who was a congressional staffer in the 90s and served in Congress from 2015 to 2019. "Even while Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were going at each other, they realized you still had to get governing done."
More than a dozen former House members told NPR they see significant challenges for lawmakers and the institution of Congress.
"I don't think anybody wants to have a job where you can't get the job done," said Illinois Democrat Cheri Bustos, who helped recruit candidates to run for office when she led the party's House campaign arm.
"Right now," she said, "it's increasingly difficult to get the job done."
"You go to Congress because you have ambition to try to fix problems that you see. I got tired of just voting on a bunch of messaging bills that were never going to be taken up by the Senate, that were all pretend." — Former Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., 2011-2017
Former members detailed an increasing centralization of power in party leadership they said comes at the expense of committees. Members once saw committee leadership roles as a path to wield influence and power.
Dan Lipinski, an Illinois Democrat who served from 2005 to 2021, said a committee gavel means less now than it used to.
"The speaker's office will tell the committee chair, 'this is what we want to see in this bill, this is what we don't want in this bill,'" he told NPR after a day back on Capitol Hill talking to current members about their concerns. "If the committees aren't working, then members don't really have an opportunity to be legislators."
Former members described how over time, intervention from leadership in processes like debates and amendments has limited the involvement of rank-and-file members.
"The House operates from the leadership position top-down rather than from subcommittees moving up to full committees, where you have more bipartisanship," said Fred Upton. The Michigan Republican served from 1987 to 2023 and chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, where he played a critical role in his party's debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act.
Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican who served from 2005 to 2025, made it clear he left Congress "loving it" and finds it "sour grapes and unbecoming" when former members complain that Congress is diminished.
McHenry was once a member of House GOP leadership and chaired the Financial Services Committee. He pointed to a "brokenness of the legislative process" that he said has risen over the last fifty years.
"The work stacks up in summer and then we leave the month before the budget is supposed to be done," he said. "The rules of the Senate dictate you have to have 60 votes to do anything on policy, so everything for the majority party when they have the White House comes resting on the third piece, which is the budget process, to get everything you could possibly get done in the budget reconciliation process."
McHenry said most of the agenda "hinges upon one big piece of legislation", which means if a measure isn't included in that bill, it's hard to get it through at all.
Former members said the congressional calendar — which now typically has the House working 3.5 days a week — leaves little time to build consensus.
"There's real opportunity to get things done when you're able to spend time and you can see unity of purpose," McHenry said. "But it's difficult with the congressional calendar."
"One member said, ‘I'll be traveling more days this year between home and Washington than I’ll actually be in Washington.' That’s an issue." — Former Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., 2005-2021
When Newt Gingrich became speaker in 1995, he shortened the congressional work week to roughly three days so that members would have more time in their districts — and so they could spend more time fundraising for re-election.
Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who served from 1989 to 2017, said it completely transformed the culture.
"We didn't get barbecues together, we didn't do any of the things that used to happen on the weekends to make it a community and make compromises easier," he said. "You have to know somebody a little bit before you trust them, and getting to know somebody is not just on the floor listening to speeches, for heaven's sakes. It's watching them deal with their kids. It's how fair they are on the basketball court."
Former members said the less time lawmakers spend with colleagues on the opposite side of the aisle, the more partisanship deepens.
"When I arrived in Congress, I thought there was a lack of bipartisanship, that the degree of comity and cooperation had reached a new low," said Dan Kildee, a Democrat from Michigan who served from 2013 to 2025. "But I didn't realize those were actually the good days of my time in Congress."
Multiple members said partisanship is increasingly rewarded when lawmakers with the most partisan rhetoric get more media coverage and fundraising dollars.
"I got to the point where I wanted to have a conversation with a Republican colleague that I didn't know and [I said], 'I want you to know that I don't view you as my enemy,'" said Anna Eshoo, a Democrat who represented California from 1993 to 2025. "Isn't that something, that I felt like I needed to say that?"
The nature of the congressional calendar reveals another lifestyle challenge former members cited — the toll on families.
"The biggest sacrifice is your spouse, your kids," said Upton. "If you're in a district like mine, 650 miles away from D.C., you're gone half the time. So you're missing birthdays, school events, or just taking a walk with your spouse."
While it used to be fairly common for members to sleep in their offices while in D.C. to avoid the financial burden of paying for two homes, Congress has boosted what members can reimburse for living expenses. But Congress has not adjusted its salary for cost of living increases in line with the rest of the federal workforce.
"I don't know any American citizen who would think their employer is being fair to them if they had not gotten a raise for their work since 2009," said Reid Ribble, R-Wis., who served from 2011-2017.
Raising pay — which sits at $174,000 — is a tough sell. But Charlie Dent, R-Pa., said it has practical implications for Congress, too.
"Certainly a person with a lot more money who doesn't have to live on a congressional salary can do just fine without a raise, but there are others who cannot," said Dent, who served from 2005-2018. "And so it's probably keeping some good people from running for Congress."
Kildee said all these factors combined can make it hard to see why it's worth it.
"A person thinking about running for Congress, realizing that will mean spending a lot of time away from home, going back and forth to Washington — but for what purpose?" he said. "Many of us were willing to do that because we saw a purpose. At the end of a week or the end of a month, you can look at what you did and see you made a difference in somebody's life and it was you making it happen. Whereas now it's much more difficult to see that."
"It just feels like the moment we live in is much more dangerous and our politics more fractured than at any point I can remember." — Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., 2005-2018
Members said they've also seen the number of threats lawmakers face skyrocket in recent years.
"There were always threats, but when I first arrived, those threats were rare, isolated instances," said Kildee. "Now, rank-and-file members have to deal with threats that are routine."
Bustos described a major shift between when she was first elected in 2012 and when she left in 2023.
"The first office I opened was in a secure building where you had to have a code to get in. I viewed it at the time as obstacles to reach our staff or to reach me," she said.
"I made a decision to get out of that building because I wanted to be very accessible," she said. "Fast forward toward the end of my career in Congress, and the staff didn't feel safe. We had to install these little buttons that would go to the local police department in case somebody was there and threatening. In the course of less than ten years, the mindset about accessibility changed because of the threats — and it's only gotten worse since then."
Congress has a longstanding mutual aid program that allows local law enforcement to be reimbursed for providing security for members when they're in their home districts.
And in the aftermath of the targeted violence of state lawmakers in Minnesota this summer, the House launched a pilot program to increase lawmakers' security allotment.
U.S. Capitol Police told NPR its agents are on track to work through roughly 14,000 threat assessment cases by the end of the year.
"The Constitution intended Congress to be the most important branch of the government. It turns the lights on. It can shut government down. But now, Congress is so functionless, it's taken itself out of the game." — Former Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., 1983-1995, 2003-2023
Beyond concerns about the shift of power towards leadership at the expense of rank-and-file members, former lawmakers in both parties decried what they view as Congress abdicating its responsibilities to the executive branch.
"I'm most concerned about the erosion of Congress' power of the purse authorities," said Dent. "We're seeing on tariffs how the president is unilaterally able to raise taxes without a vote of the Congress. That's deeply troubling to me."
The Trump administration has defunded agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and utilized what's called a pocket rescission to cancel funding that has already been appropriated by Congress.
"The ceding of power from Congress to the president has historically been an issue, but it has gotten much worse over the last 25 years and it has reached probably the highest level of congressional deference that we have ever seen," said Lipinski.
He described a recent conversation with a member who's part of the whip team, which is responsible for counting heads on key legislation.
"If a member says, either I'm undecided or I'm not going to vote with the party, then that member who is part of the whip team says, 'well, do you want a call from the president today or tomorrow?'" Lipinski recalled. "That kind of deference to a president, it doesn't matter who the president is, that is not the way our democracy is supposed to work."
"It's a very contentious time for many members of Congress, dangerous, challenging times. I think better times will come again, but we need patriots." — Former Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., 2013-2025
Multiple former members told NPR when people ask if they should run for Congress, they recommend state offices instead.
"I always tell people, really look at running in the state because you can make a difference there," said Comstock, pointing to two former House members — Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill — who won gubernatorial elections last month. "They're still functioning."
Others insisted despite the growing challenges, there's still opportunities for good work to get done on Capitol Hill.
"You can still make a difference," said McHenry. "It is hard. It is definitely a beast that you can never master, you can just seek to improve day by day."
Cooper put it more bluntly: "There are certain things that are more important than having work life balance in your job. If you want a decent country to live in, we better have a good Congress."
He said the country needs "more good people to run."
"Now, I'm embarrassed to teach at Vanderbilt Law School when the dumbest student in my class will make more in their first job than I made after 32 years in Congress. But hey, that's life, and a good congressman will never be paid what he or she is worth," he said. "But you'll have a better country as a result. And you'll have a better place for your kids and grandkids to live. Isn't that worth something?"
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