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Foreword by Senator Lee

Washington is broken and everyone in America knows it.

Every day the chronic dysfunction of the federal government becomes harder to ignore. Nearly $20 trillion of national debt, boosted by massive annual deficits as far as the eye can see. Soaring corporate profits on Wall Street and stagnant wages on Main Street, thanks to unfair tax and regulatory systems engineered by and for the politically well-connected. A bloated bureaucracy—insulated from the consequences of its decisions—that raises the cost and lowers the quality of nearly everything it touches, from health care to higher education to our social-safety-net programs. Meanwhile, our political debates seem to have descended from a contest of ideas to a lot of yelling and finger-pointing.

No wonder recent polls show that a mere 19 percent of Americans say they trust the federal government.

In the pages that follow, David Schoenbrod explains how we got here and how we can start to rehabilitate our government so that it once again is of, by, and for the people. Through a series of riveting—and often infuriating—blow-by-blow accounts exposing the ugly reality of today’s deceptive lawmaking process, he shows that the problems in Washington can’t be pinned on one party or one president, but have instead accreted over decades. But DC Confidential is more than a polemic against a discredited, flailing political establishment. It is equal parts diagnosis and prescription, tied together with a penetrating historical and legal analysis that identifies the proximate cause of the structural dysfunction plaguing our federal government: a weak and timid Congress that seeks above all to avoid responsibility for the consequences of harmful laws by, as Professor Schoenbrod explains, “enacting popular policies” that promise big benefits while “shunting [the] hard choices” of lawmaking to an executive branch agency.

Herein lies the profound insight of Schoenbrod’s superb exploration of the tricks of Washington and the key to fixing what’s broken in the federal government.

The only way to put the American people back in charge of Washington is to put Congress back in charge of federal lawmaking.

Restoring the legislative branch’s proper constitutional role and making Congress once again responsible—in the sense of both discharging its constitutional duties and taking responsibility for the consequences—is the reason I came to Washington in 2010. And it’s why I recently joined several colleagues in the House and Senate to launch the Article I Project, a network of reform-oriented lawmakers working together on an agenda of congressional empowerment designed to put elected representatives in Congress—rather than unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats—back in the driver’s seat of federal policy making.

As Schoenbrod shows, Congress’s habitual abdication of its constitutional duties is a problem years in the making, and fixing it will not be easy. But in a democratic republic like ours, the first step toward government reform is always to educate the people, so that they are empowered to hold their elected representatives accountable for their decisions. That’s exactly what DC Confidential aims to achieve, and it’s why this book should be required reading for anyone who believes it’s still possible to reform our failing public institutions and put the federal government back to work for the American people.

Mike Lee

United States Senator, Utah, 2011–Present