Near the outset of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Alice finds herself running hand in hand with the Red Queen. Exerting herself to the fullest, she can barely keep up with the chess piece, yet when they finally come to a halt, she finds that they have not moved at all. In response to Alice’s statement that, in her world, she would have expected all that running to get her somewhere, the Queen responds, “A slow sort of country! Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Alice’s predicament is much like that of the US Congress today. Given the second Trump administration’s frenetic pace, our legislators must run very fast indeed just to stay in the picture—and it isn’t clear their exertions are up to the task. The Senate has shown record-breaking alacrity in confirming Trump’s executive branch appointees, but in just about every other area Congress is falling behind or taking steps to shore up its own irrelevance.
Consider the current centerpiece of Donald Trump’s agenda: tariffs. The power to impose and adjust tariffs was once Congress’s crown jewel, a source of institutional clout. But since the Great Depression, generations of legislators have elevated the president at their own expense, believing this was the best way to secure a world with freer trade. That calculation proved right for a long time but has gone awry under a president with autarkic economic instincts.
MAGA lawmakers now guard the president’s discretionary power to set tariffs with the same jealousy Henry Clay had in guarding his own. Anxious to avoid a vote that would knock out Trump’s declaration of a (fentanyl-related) emergency on America’s northern border, which empowers him to slap tariffs on our second-largest trading partner, House Republican leaders went so far as to sneak through a provision that declares all subsequent days of the 119th Congress “shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of the National Emergency Act. Time flies when you’re trying to keep up with the Queen.
As it hustles along, Congress’s power of the purse has been dangling by a thread while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) yanks away. From his formally mysterious but powerful position in the White House, Musk and his team have giddily applied a chainsaw remedy to America’s spending problems, promising to cut away waste, fraud, and abuse and thereby steer the US away from national bankruptcy. Republicans on Capitol Hill eagerly associated themselves with this effort, saying that DOGE’s unprecedented access to information would empower it to see better than Congress could, given Biden administration stonewalling. (Why Congress might not do better itself, is a question mostly unasked and entirely unanswered in 2025.)
Nor has that enthusiasm diminished as DOGE data dives yield major cuts to congressionally funded agencies, veering close to an assertion of presidential impoundment power that would leave Congress’s fiscal powers greatly diminished. A few Republican lawmakers have publicly expressed dismay at ill-targeted cuts affecting their own districts, and there are indications of plenty of behind-the-scenes grumbling, but there is nothing to suggest that Congress will either rein in DOGE or act to ensure the legal status of its work through new legislation.
Instead, Congress went through a noisy, but mostly inconsequential, funding fight in March on the way to passing a full-year continuing resolution. Though it pained members on both sides of the aisle, legislators gave up on their efforts to write new spending laws for fiscal year (FY) 2025. Instead, they chose to continue, with just minor alterations, the spending levels carried over from FY2024. DOGE’s bold cuts, every one of which is being contested in courts, were simply left out of the equation, meaning that agencies and programs that the executive branch has summarily terminated nevertheless got their funding renewed in law.
Many Democrats, meanwhile, wanted Senate Democrats to force a government shutdown if the law failed to specifically repudiate DOGE. They were livid at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for choosing to fight another day. Whatever one makes of the merits of Republicans’ continuing resolution or Schumer’s insistence that Democrats had no leverage, the American people can be forgiven for their frustrations with congressional fecklessness on this front.
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Congressional Republicans are not resigned to irrelevance; they are instead focusing their efforts on budget reconciliation. As part of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, lawmakers forged the reconciliation process as a tool to help keep up with fast-changing fiscal developments in pursuit of a balanced budget. But it has since become the go-to maneuver for partisan trifectas looking to enact party-line legislation without having to overcome a Senate filibuster. There are constraints on what can be shoehorned into a reconciliation bill—but they are not set in stone, and recent Congresses have pushed against them. At this point, Republican leaders explicitly plead with their members not to take anything about the budget resolution too seriously as an exercise in budgeting. Rather, it is the way Congress can advance the president’s agenda in the form of one big, beautiful bill—what they call it in official press releases.
The reconciliation bill does give legislators a chance to move their priorities. Even if the end product is sold as a simple realization of Trump’s vision, the actual bill will contain multitudes (as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 did). Given the two parties’ lack of interest in working with each other on just about anything right now, reconciliation is congressional Republicans’ best chance to do something more than run in place. But keeping their own members together is going to require a truly monumental feat of political discipline, not the party’s strong suit in recent years.
Deficit hawks will have to talk themselves into believing in a colossal magic asterisk if they’re going to say with a straight face that the effort will improve the nation’s fiscal situation; almost certainly it will make it worse. The New York and California contingents are dead set on lifting the cap for deducting state and local taxes, even if most of their Republican colleagues thought putting that cap in place was one of the biggest wins of the 2017 law.
And there is now a major divide in the Republican camp about Medicaid. Party leaders have been keen to cut the low-income health program for years, but Trump’s comparatively downscale 2024 electorate includes many more voters who depend on the program. Eight GOP members from districts with heavily Hispanic populations warned they might not support a reconciliation bill that slashed the program.
Perhaps these difficulties can all be ironed out; perhaps Trump’s stature in the party will enable him to bring all the holdouts along. At best, it will be a close-run thing. And as fast and monomaniacally as party leaders have been running toward this goal, it has been receding. Speaker Mike Johnson originally said he hoped the House could pass its reconciliation bill by April, with Memorial Day being a “worst-case scenario” for final passage. At this point, though, a bill in the fall would be a major win. As of this writing, there is not even a budget resolution in place, which is a necessary precursor to a budget reconciliation bill.
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On a wide variety of fronts, Congress is not even trying to keep up with the Trump administration’s myriad activities.
Republicans on the Hill barely have time to offer their congratulations to the White House for stamping out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; harrowing America’s institutions of higher education; reimposing a regulatory budget; ramping up deportations; shrinking the federal employee headcount; remaking the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; or bombing Houthi militias in Yemen (though, of course, many members managed to have opinions about one infamously insecure group chat). They have noticed how many of these actions are hung up in court and have set their sights on diminishing the power of federal district court judges to hinder the executive branch by issuing nationwide injunctions.
This is emblematic of how legislators perceive the policymaking process in 2025. Knowing that the real action is in the other two branches, lawmakers gesture at shaping the struggles between them rather than simply trying to pass new laws that would decisively clarify federal powers. Those of us who believe legislators ought to have grander ambitions for their institution are dismissed as starry-eyed idealists who fail to understand “what time it is.”
Whatever the hour, our constitutional system remains what it is, with congressional lawmaking given pride of place. The Queen is moving at a remarkable speed, yet it is not clear how far she is getting. The president and his core supporters exult in having brought us into the age of Trump, and they have undoubtedly forever reshaped American politics. But when it comes to governing particulars, the mark they will leave is far less certain. Court cases proceed slowly, but eventually many administration actions will be reversed by judges, as they were in the first Trump administration. One day a Democrat will sit in the White House again, and that president will surely reverse huge numbers of Trump administration policies on his or her first day. None of that makes the current flurry of activity inconsequential, but it does put it in sharp contrast to a sea change like Franklin Roosevelt’s famous 100 days in 1933, which featured a Congress falling over itself to pass ambitious bills from the new administration. State building through law is simply more durable than state building through the actions of a term-limited president. (Ahem.)The Red Queen metaphor illuminates our current political system in one last way too. In 1973, a century after the book’s original publication, the American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen published a paper offering a “Red Queen hypothesis” on the dynamics of species extinction. He argued that a species must continually evolve to not just increase its fitness and population but merely survive in an environment full of coevolving predators, parasites, and competitors. As in nature, so too in our constitutional separation of powers; if one branch’s ambition fails to counteract the overweening ambition of another, it should expect to go the way of the dodo, who may have had a charming afterlife as a character in Wonderland but here, in our world, exists only as a museum piece. Avoiding that fate will take more than finding a way to pass the one big, beautiful bill. It will require members of the House and Senate to spend their political capital on institutional reforms that restore vitality to their respective chambers. It is time for that, now, but lawmakers had better get running—fast.
Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023). This essay first appeared in The American Enterprise.
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