Public Trust, Representation, and the Cost of Congressional Dysfunction

2028 Presidential Campaign of

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

March 18, 2026

Government costs money. That is not a complaint — it is a fact, and this campaign accepts it. Roads cost money. Courts cost money. A military that keeps the country safe costs money. The question is not whether government is expensive. The question is whether what we are spending produces what we said it would.

On that question, the current Congress has a great deal to answer for.

I. What We Are Actually Paying For

The federal government spends roughly $6.5 trillion per year. That number includes everything from Social Security payments to aircraft carriers to the salaries of the civil servants who process your passport application. Most of it goes to things the American people broadly support, even if they don't always know the details.

But embedded in that total is a substantial and growing cost that produces nothing of value to any citizen: the cost of congressional dysfunction. The cost of duplicative programs that exist because no committee will allow a competing committee's program to be eliminated. The cost of continuing resolutions and government shutdowns that force agencies to operate in fiscal paralysis for months at a time. The cost of oversight hearings designed to generate clips rather than produce accountability.

"When Congress stops functioning as a deliberative body and becomes a performance venue, the American people pay for the show — and they pay again for everything the show prevented from getting done."

II. The Representation Problem

Every member of Congress represents everyone in their district or state — not just the voters who elected them, and not just the members of their own party. This is not a matter of preference. It is the constitutional structure of representative government.

In practice, it has been largely abandoned. Congressional offices are organized around partisan service. District offices in many cases operate as outposts of one party's constituent services, directing resources and attention to registered voters of the right affiliation and treating others as problems to be managed. Committee structures exclude minority views from the legislative process as a matter of routine.

This is not governance. It is faction management — and it is precisely what the Founders warned against when they wrote about the dangers of what Madison called "the mischiefs of faction."

The remedy is not a new law, though some structural reforms would help. The remedy is a change in what Congress is rewarded for — and that change begins with the executive branch modeling a different standard.

III. What This Administration Will Do

This campaign has already described the walk-in access model — the policy of rewarding members of Congress who serve all their constituents, regardless of party, with direct access to the President. That is one tool.

But the deeper commitment is this: this administration will refuse to play the partisan game at the congressional level. We will submit our legislative proposals to members of both parties simultaneously. We will hold briefings for all relevant committee members, majority and minority alike. We will publish our cost projections, our implementation timelines, and our performance metrics for every major initiative — not because we are required to, but because an administration that operates transparently creates political cover for legislators who want to engage seriously rather than perform reflexively.

Cross-agency initiatives — programs that require cooperation between departments that currently operate in silos — will be a particular focus. When HHS, Labor, and Education are working from the same data toward the same goal, it becomes much harder for Congress to assign partisan blame for outcomes that are genuinely shared. That is a feature, not a bug.

"Transparency is the most powerful tool against dysfunction because it makes the costs of dysfunction visible. When the public can see exactly what their representatives are doing — and what it is costing — the incentive structure begins to change."

IV. The Fiscal Reality

Congressional dysfunction carries a documented price tag — measured not in campaign estimates, but in findings from the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, the Government Accountability Office, and the United States Senate.

The five-week partial government shutdown of 2018–2019 delayed approximately $18 billion in federal discretionary spending and produced an $11 billion reduction in gross domestic product — $3 billion of which the Congressional Budget Office determined will never be recovered. The GDP measurement methodology used by CBO draws directly on the Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts, the government's authoritative measure of economic output. The six-week shutdown of 2025 — the longest in American history — produced an estimated permanent economic loss of between $7 billion and $14 billion according to CBO projections. A 2019 Senate investigation found that just three shutdowns — in 2013, 2018, and 2019 — wasted nearly $4 billion in direct taxpayer costs before accounting for broader economic damage. OMB's own official estimate of the 2013 shutdown alone found $2.5 billion in pay and benefits paid to furloughed employees for hours not worked, plus roughly $10 million in penalty interest and lost fee collections.

Continuing resolutions compound the problem across every year that Congress fails to pass a budget on time. The Government Accountability Office has documented that CRs systematically slow agency hiring, freeze procurement decisions, and force financial and human resources staff to spend weeks preparing contingency plans for shutdowns that may or may not materialize — time during which none of that staff is doing the work they were hired to do. The most recent year in which all full-year appropriations bills passed on time was fiscal year 1997. Since that year, Congress has funded the government primarily through continuing resolutions in almost every fiscal year. That is not a budgetary anomaly. It is a structural failure, normalized by repetition.

This administration will fight to end both. We will submit a full budget on time, every year. We will negotiate in good faith with Congress on appropriations and will make those negotiations public. We will not use the budget process as a hostage-taking mechanism, and we will make clear that we expect the same from the legislative branch.

If Congress continues to choose dysfunction, that choice will be visible. The American people will know exactly who made it and what it cost. That is not a threat. It is a description of what transparent governance looks like — and what accountability requires.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

Sources

Primary Sources

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs), Federal Government Current Receipts and Expenditures. Available at: https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-and-personal-income

U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Official Estimate of the Cost of the October 2013 Government Shutdown (Office of Management and Budget, November 2013). As cited in: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 'Government Shutdowns Q&A: Everything You Should Know' (January 26, 2026). Available at: https://www.crfb.org/papers/government-shutdowns-qa-everything-you-should-know

U.S. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2019 to 2029 (Congressional Budget Office, January 2019). Available at: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54918

Secondary Sources

Congressional Budget Office, 'The Effects of the Partial Shutdown Ending in January 2019' (Congressional Budget Office, January 2019). Available at: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54937

Congressional Budget Office, 'A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of the Government Shutdown on the Economy Under Three Scenarios' (Congressional Budget Office, October 29, 2025). Available at: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61773

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 'Government Shutdowns Q&A: Everything You Should Know' (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, January 26, 2026). Available at: https://www.crfb.org/papers/government-shutdowns-qa-everything-you-should-know

United States Government Accountability Office, 'Federal Budget: Selected Agencies and Programs Used Strategies to Manage Constraints of Continuing Resolutions' GAO-22-104701 (Government Accountability Office, June 30, 2022; publicly released August 1, 2022). Available at: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104701

Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 'Continuing Resolutions Were Designed to Be Stopgap Measures — But Now We Average Five a Year' (Peter G. Peterson Foundation, November 13, 2025). Available at: https://www.pgpf.org/article/continuing-resolutions-were-designed-to-be-stopgap-measures-but-now-we-average-five-a-year/

Brookings Institution, 'Government Shutdowns: Causes and Effects' (Brookings Institution, updated February 3, 2026). Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-a-government-shutdown-and-why-are-we-likely-to-have-another-one/