Defending and Rebuilding Congress

In 2025, the American Governance Institute confronted immediate threats to congressional independence while advancing its long-term effort to rebuild Congress as a strong governing institution.

Defending the legislative branch

Unprecedented challenges to the constitutional order emerged this year as the White House sought to assert control over core legislative branch authorities. AGI anticipated these threats, raised the alarm, and helped mobilize Congress to defend its institutional prerogatives. 

AGI acted immediately when the White House sought to seize control of key legislative branch agencies by replacing their leadership with presidential loyalists. We explained the stakes to the press, through our newsletter, and in private meetings with congressional offices. By year’s end, our work helped drive the introduction of legislation to provide Congress untrammeled authority over selecting and removing legislative branch agency leaders.

We also intervened when administration allies in the House of Representatives moved to cede Congress’s power of the purse to the White House. Administration-aligned partisans proposed cutting the Government Accountability Office’s funding in half, crippling its oversight capacity, and stripping its authority to sue the administration over illegal impoundments. The House also proposed serious cuts for the Library of Congress, which provides confidential advice to members and staff. By drawing attention to the negative impact of these cuts and working with stakeholders, we helped secure passage of a law that reversed these proposals for fiscal year 2026. 

Sustaining reform 

Congress was vulnerable to these unprecedented threats to its constitutional authorities because of decades of institutional atrophy. The centralization of political power in the hands of a few congressional leaders in each party has weakened members’ ability and willingness to act institutionally. For years, we have worked to strengthen legislative branch muscles by re-empowering members and the lawmaking process. This requires members to have the capacity to organize resilient coalitions, obtain timely access to information, possess sufficient staff support to navigate complex issues, and be ready to use their imagination to conceive of what could be. We continued to make progress on this longer-term legislative strengthening project in concert with our coalition and congressional partners. 

⦿ Institutional reform agenda. AGI sustained a long-term collaboration to modernize the rules of the House of Representatives in furtherance of a stronger, more capable Congress. Building on our previous efforts, we began mobilizing support for reordering chamber rules in the next Congress to create the conditions for transformational changes in how the House functions. We are developing and promoting reforms that will enable blocs of members to generate cross-partisan solutions and weaken the partisan teamsmanship that has driven gridlock and deference to the executive branch. We will further refine and generate support for these ideas with institutional allies starting early in 2026 as the process of formulating the rules package for the 120th Congress moves forward.

⦿ Technology and data modernization. We have long understood that technological improvements in the legislative branch are essential to empowering members and staff to participate in co-governing. Leveraging AGI’s role as founder and lead civil society partner in the Congressional Data Task Force, we advanced a civic technology innovation cycle to develop new solutions, secure congressional buy-in, and move them into production. To further spur innovation, we produced — in partnership with the House Digital Service — the first detailed map of legislative data sources, fulfilling a congressional imperative AGI had long advocated. We also partnered with the Brazil-based organization Bússola Tech to provide congressional technologists with fresh ideas and technical assistance in developing tools through a three-day confidential convening in the U.S. Capitol. 

⦿ Appropriations capacity-building. Our years of experience navigating the congressional appropriations process to secure institutional-strengthening reforms are a unique success story in the democracy reform space. We have learned that our efforts became more successful when we brought more organizations into the process. To that end, we organized training sessions, assisted testimony submissions, advanced scores of proposals, and developed a new appropriations handbook for other nonprofits to join in this approach. These efforts bore fruit: we and our partners had 23 requests included in the FY26 legislative branch appropriations bill. 

⦿ Open government coordination. Congress relies on civil society and the media to alert it to key executive branch information management decisions with direct implications for government transparency and accountability. During a period of decreased support for open government work, we kept a broad bipartisan coalition of organizations collaborating. We were ready to sound the alarm when the White House began removing websites and deleting public datasets. This early warning prompted civil society to create independent data repositories.

AGI expanded the reach and influence of its expertise throughout the year. The First Branch Forecast grew by more than 1,000 subscribers, reaching over 3,000 weekly readers with open rates consistently exceeding sector benchmarks. We launched an interview series featuring members of Congress, legislative branch agency leaders, and leading scholars. We were quoted or cited 50 times in national and trade media, including Federal News Network, Politico, Roll Call, Rolling Stone, Talking Points Memo, and the American Prospect. We held numerous meetings with members of Congress and congressional staff. 

2026 will be a pivotal year for the institutions of our republic. We will build on these efforts to bend the arc of history towards a durable democracy.