As Congress prepares to leave town for the August recess, it’s an opportune moment to take stock of the congressional record and assess the willingness of its members to discharge their constitutional responsibilities in foreign policy, national security, and international economic affairs. Seven months into President Donald Trump’s second administration, the 119th 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.
Far from reclaiming its prerogatives under Article I of the Constitution, the current 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. The administration has every right to do so as long as it operates within the bounds of constitutional law; and Congress has the right and responsibility to assert its own powers in reflection of Americans’ interests.
The pattern of congressional capitulation, however, is evident across multiple domains: the unchecked use of military force, unilateral economic coercion, the dismantling of development infrastructure, and a breakdown in oversight and advice-and-consent functions. In short, members of the 119th Congress – led by Republicans but with too much acquiescence from Democrats – have demonstrated a troubling trend: an accelerating abdication of their constitutional responsibilities in foreign policy, national security, and international economic affairs. Despite early murmurs about institutional revival, Congress has repeatedly failed to act as a coequal branch, even when faced with decisions involving war, the global economy, and the very infrastructure of U.S. foreign engagement.
The Constitution’s framers vested broad powers in the Congress — the power to declare war, regulate commerce, lay and collect tariffs, set the rules of naturalization, appropriate funds, and oversee the executive. Yet, Congress over the decades has gifted broad authorities to the White House. It’s not that Congress has been outmaneuvered; rather, it has engaged in constitutional quiet quitting, with stakes so immense they are difficult to quantify both for America’s global leadership and for its democracy and the people’s interests at home.
Bombs, Votes, and Silence: Iran and the Use of Force
One of the most stark examples of this abdication of responsibility came in June, when U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. These significant military actions were undertaken with no prior bipartisan consultation with Congress, nor was the executive branch’s authority drawn from any existing statutory grant of power. Instead, the White House asserted inherent powers under the Constitution’s Article II to justify the strikes, a broad interpretation that bypasses congressional war-making authority.
The legislative response was muted and ultimately ineffective. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced a war powers joint resolution requiring congressional authorization for further military action against Iran. However, this measure was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 53-47. The House of Representatives failed even to bring the measure to a vote. This decisive legislative inaction meant that Congress, by failing to assert its constitutional prerogative, effectively post-facto ratified unilateral military action without substantive debate or explicit authorization, solidifying a dangerous precedent for executive war-making.
Emergency Tariffs and Trade by Fiat
The administration’s unilateral approach has extended to international economic policy, further eroding congressional authority over commerce. In April, Trump issued a proclamation under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), declaring a national economic emergency and imposing sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” on a broad range of imports. These tariffs were set at 10 percent across the board, with rates climbing as high as 50 percent for autos from South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. The use of IEEPA in this manner is legally contentious — the statute was originally intended for sanctions against foreign adversaries or in response to true national security threats, not for broad trade disputes. Yet Congress mounted little effective resistance.
This was followed by an even more brazen invocation of IEEPA in July. The White House announced a new tariff regime targeting Brazilian beef and soy exports, explicitly contingent on the status of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s legal proceedings. The administration justified the move under IEEPA’s emergency powers, citing purported political instability and hostile actions against U.S. companies. Legal scholars immediately questioned the constitutionality of using a national emergency statute for political interference in another country’s domestic judicial process, warning that the action stretches the statute beyond recognition.
This reliance on national security emergency powers for deeply politicized foreign economic coercion, untethered from established law, precedent, or strategic coherence, proceeds largely unchecked by the legislative branch. This approach undermines international trade norms, risks retaliatory measures from allies, and blurs the lines between national security and political leverage, potentially isolating the United States on the global economic stage.
Reconciliation as Appeasement: The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)
Congress’s retreat is also evident in its legislative agenda. In July, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), a sweeping reconciliation package (an expedited legislative process that allows certain budget-related bills to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass with a simple majority vote) that, while focused on domestic policy, has profound implications for America’s global engagement. The bill, which is projected to add approximately $3 trillion to the national debt over the coming decade including interest, contained major tax cuts and extensive energy deregulation.
More critically for foreign policy, the bill dramatically scaled back U.S. international engagement on several fronts. It effectively eliminated funding for several key accounts, including significant portions of climate-related development finance, severely curtailing U.S. leadership in global environmental efforts. The measure also substantially reduced global health and food security programs, with some sectors experiencing cuts estimated to be as high as 60 percent. These legislative actions, far from asserting congressional authority over spending, represent a proactive legislative endorsement of a diminished U.S. global footprint—a striking departure from historical norms of congressional engagement in foreign aid and a weakening of humanitarian efforts worldwide.
This legislative retreat is compounded by the executive branch’s aggressive use of impoundment authority. The White House has already effectively rescinded billions in previously appropriated foreign assistance, including funding for lifesaving health and humanitarian assistance, and has stated its intent to reduce the State Department budget for programs that had previously been administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by some 84 percent — exploiting Congress’s failure to block these actions under the Impoundment Control Act. These moves are not just budgetary but strategic: they signal an American withdrawal from international development, multilateralism, and the soft-power strategy that has made the United States the global leader, leaving vacuums that strategic competitors like China are eager to fill.
And with Congress passing Trump’s $9 billion rescission package on July 18 — targeting roughly $8 billion for foreign assistance programs, even as it preserved $400 million in proposed cuts to PEPFAR — it looks like China will be given the opportunity. First, it potentially sets up a never-ending cycle of appropriations to reconciliation to rescissions, breaking the appropriations process beyond salvation, where no Congressionally-mandated spending is ever safe, even if signed into law by the president. Perhaps most troubling from the perspective of legislative-executive balance, however, is that the rescissions package Congress passed lacks details about how the cuts will be implemented. That makes it effectively impossible for Congress to carry out its constitutional responsibilities to oversee the power of the purse.
Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) made a statement on the floor prior to the vote that “I’m prepared to vote for this rescission package with the hope that I can trust those who are going to make the detailed decisions.” That seems to forget the very fundamentals of James Madison’s arguments for checks and balances laid out in Federalist 51. It was an oversight made all the more glaring by his statement after the vote that “We have no earthly idea what specific cuts will occur.”
Confirmation Theater and Oversight Failure
The decline in congressional assertiveness extends to its “advice and consent” and oversight responsibilities. Key national security posts at the State Department and USAID remain either unfilled or held by acting officials lacking substantive foreign policy experience. The Senate’s confirmation process for these critical positions has been marked by a lack of rigor and a breakdown in comity, with the majority ignoring minority holds on nominees (a practice where an individual senator can delay or block committee action on a presidential nominee, often to extract concessions or express opposition) in another sign of institutional decay with likely long-term effects. In some cases, hearings more closely resemble ideological rubber-stamping than robust scrutiny.
Oversight more broadly has withered. Since January, the Republican chairs of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have declined to hold substantive public hearings on the most sweeping changes ever to foreign and national security policy, including the Iran strikes, IEEPA tariffs, the dismantlement of USAID and reform of the State Department, impoundment of appropriated funds, or the elements and implications of the foreign aid rescissions. While some general foreign policy hearings have occurred, the absence of robust public deliberation on these critical, controversial executive actions signals a profound deficit in congressional strategic thinking and its role as a forum for national debate.
This oversight vacuum means critical foreign policy decisions are made and implemented with minimal public scrutiny or input from diverse expert perspectives, eroding democratic accountability and potentially leading to less effective and less sustainable foreign policy outcomes. Subpoena power has gone unused. Investigations proposed by minority staff have stalled in committee. As of July, there has been no sustained effort to oversee the administration’s fundamental shift in sanctions policy, global health strategy, or arms transfers — or anything else, for that matter.
This moment of profound change could be an opportunity for Congress to restore a bipartisan equilibrium on foreign policy. Privately, most Republicans agree that DOGE went too far, cutting programs that protect Americans from diseases that have no borders and halting sales from Americans farmers to feed people in need. There is now a space to come together on shared foreign assistance and policy priorities defined by a more strategic but still compassionate foreign policy that positions the United States to compete with near-peer rivals.
Once again, it rests with Congress to take up the authorities granted and to recognize that the greatest risk to the United States isn’t the election success of the other party, but the failure of Congress to use its authority, thereby unbalancing the branches and jeopardizing American democracy. In a world in which the outcomes of decisions can often fall victim to external forces, the integrity of the process by which decisions are made can confer value. That was much of the logic for the powers that the founders, in their wisdom, vested in Congress for the conduct of foreign policy. For all the rhetorical veneration of the founders that congressional Republicans claim, it seems to be a veneration in theory, unsullied by any willingness to put the wisdom to work in practice.
The Constitution’s Article I in Abeyance
Not all members have gone along quietly. The White House had to walk back its proposal to slash PEPFAR by some $400 million in its rescission package, restoring the funds under bipartisan Senate pressure. Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) has led efforts to restore funding for humanitarian assistance and to bolster congressional oversight of emergency powers. But these efforts are often late, isolated, and easily overrun by a partisan leadership intent on avoiding conflict with the president.
Why this moment of retreat? The reasons are not mysterious: political self-preservation in a hyper-partisan landscape; Republican leadership loyalty to the executive; institutional atrophy in key committees; and a deeper drift, among many members, over strategic foreign policy engagement in a period when many Americans have turned inward. Add to that a polarized electorate and the result is a Congress that treats its Article I responsibilities for national security as optional.
The Constitution gives Congress ample tools: the power of the purse, the War Powers Resolution, the confirmation process, and oversight authority. But tools unused are tools lost. And when it comes to foreign policy, Congress is increasingly not an adversary of executive aggrandizement — it is its accomplice. That is not just a danger to the constitutional order. It is a risk to American interests, credibility, and values in the world.
What’s playing out is not just a matter of political dysfunction. It reflects a deeper decay of democratic institutions — the slow erosion of norms, checks, and collective responsibility that sustain a functioning republic. When a legislature gives up its seat at the table on matters of war, peace, and global engagement, it changes the very nature of American governance. What was meant to be shared — and contested — power becomes centralized discretion, and, with it, the health of the democratic system itself and the ability to meet citizens’ needs begins to deteriorate.
Congress can still reclaim its role. The tools remain available: reform emergency authorities, reassert control over war powers and foreign assistance, tie confirmations to clear oversight expectations, and reopen the hearing rooms to serious inquiry. These are not revolutionary steps — they are merely reminders of how the system is supposed to work. But they will require a willingness by Congress to reassert itself before the opportunity to do so slips away for good.
