September 22, 2015 3:36PM # Government Failure: The Role of Congress By [Chris Edwards](https://www.cato.org/people/chris-edwards) --- SHARE In a romantic view of democracy, legislators act with the interests of the general public in mind. They grapple with policy issues, work toward a broad consensus, and pass legislation that has strong support. They frequently reevaluate existing programs and prune the low-value and harmful ones. They put citizens first and limit their actions to those allowable under the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, that is not how Congress works. It often enacts ill-conceived laws that do not have broad public support. Many programs perform poorly year after year, yet Congress gives them growing budgets. Congress almost never terminates programs because members have a hard time admitting that their policies have failed. Indeed, members try to evade blame for government failures, and they only try to fix problems after high-profile scandals have occurred. A new essay, “[Congressional Incentives and Government Failure](http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/congressional-failure),” at [Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org](http://www.downsizinggovernment.org) looks at how Congress operates. It examines the incentives that induce members to support policies counter to the general public interest. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).