Last year saw an overactive president untamed by an underactive Congress.
In 11 months, President Donald Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025, a new record, while the House of Representatives passed only 70 bills, making it one of the least productive House terms in decades.
In January 2025, Republicans enjoyed a unified government with the White House, Senate and House under GOP control, but leaders were far from unified in a year that included a 43-day government shutdown, the longest in history. House Speaker Mike Johnson then continued to keep the House on an extended hiatus.
“I am the speaker and the president,” President Trump joked to aides in October.
Meanwhile, the Senate took 659 votes, the most in modern history, according to Scripps News. Under Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the chamber approved 417 Trump nominees in record time.
Both Johnson and Thune are evangelical Christians and disciples of James Dobson, the politically active Focus on the Family founder who died in August 2025.
Johnson worked under Dobson as one of the first attorneys for legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which Dobson helped found in 1984. Johnson called Dobson “a personal hero of mine” and “a singular figure in my life” who “did more for our cause than arguably anyone in generation” at Dobson’s October memorial service.
Thune was elected in 2004 after Dobson used his platform at Focus on the Family and a new political organization called Focus on the Family Action to support Thune and five other GOP Senate candidates, all of whom won.
Dobson stumped for Thune at a huge Christian music festival, at “Stand for Family” rallies and through full-page newspaper that ran across South Dakota. (Read more about Dobson and Thune in a book excerpt.)
Congress did pass significant legislation in 2025. The most consequential act was to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was praised by pro-family conservatives for stripping $850 million in taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood, which closed dozens of clinics across the country.
The bill also cut funding for Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The Tax Foundation says the bill will reduce taxes on corporations and on workers who work overtime or are paid in tips, and will add $3 trillion to the U.S. deficit over the next decade.
Other legislative highlights of the year:
- The Rescissions Act of 2025 rescinded funding previously approved by Congress, including a $7.9 billion cut in funding for international aid and $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The aid cuts have led to increased child deaths in poorer nations, and the CPB announced its closure.
- The Laken Riley Actdirects Department of Homeland Security to take into custody immigrants who have been charged with theft and other crimes. The bill was named for a nursing student who was killed by an undocumented immigrant.
- The TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalized the sharing of deep-fake porn images and requires platforms to remove such content within 48 hours.
- The Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act adds the drug to the list of controlled substances.
- The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act allows schools that participate in the federal school lunch program to serve whole milk.
- Once Johnson ended the House’s hiatus, Democrats pushed for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law Nov. 19. It required the attorney general to release all Department of Justice files and records within 30 days of passage, but the attorney general has failed to do so two months later.
Reactions to Congress’ 2025 performance were varied.
“Congress hits rock bottom,” wrote conservative columnist George Will. “Congressional Republicans are supine, because of fear or adoration.” Will marveled at how Congress has given Trump “the power to impose tariffs as high as he chooses, on any country he chooses, for any reason he chooses, for as long as he chooses.”
The Brennan Center for Justice agreed. “A supine Congress threatens our constitutional order and our democracy. We know from international examples of democratic backsliding that when weak legislatures cede power to the executive, authoritarian leaders can more easily consolidate power. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party changed the Constitution and stripped the legislature of many powers, solidifying the autocrat’s unilateral control.”
Social media has contributed to “warped incentive structure for members of Congress,” the Brennan Center said. “The centrality of online donations, paired with dwindling legislative power, creates pressure for members to create sound bite moments rather than creating policy.”
Congress’s inactivity empowered Trump to exercise greater authority over international relations, said the legal outlet Just Security: “Congress has displayed a pattern of retreat — reflexively deferential to executive authority, ideologically fractured and politically paralyzed in the face of an administration intent on remaking America — and American global engagement — in its own image.”
By retreating, “Congress has revealed itself less as a coequal branch and more as an accomplice in the marginalization of its own constitutional role in foreign and national security policy.”
Nor has Congress stood up to the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency, in part because of the ideology of its members. The group American Progress says “119 members of the 119th Congress continue to deny the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change. These elected officials have also received a total of $51,449,854 in lifetime contributions from the fossil fuel industry.”
