We Keep Hiring the Wrong People

America’s real political crisis isn’t the system. It’s who is trying to collapse it.

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. We’ve been told for decades that Washington is broken because of gridlock, because of the rules, because of the filibuster or the donors or the two-party system. All of that may be true. But there’s a more uncomfortable truth sitting right in front of us, one we keep refusing to look at directly.

The people we elect to fix the system have no intention of fixing it. And we keep electing them anyway.

Performance Artists, Not Problem Solvers

Congress has a 14% approval rating. It has hovered somewhere between miserable and historically embarrassing for the better part of two decades. And yet, somehow, re-election rates for incumbents routinely clear 90%. Stop and sit with that number. Nine out of ten people we say we hate are sent right back to Washington by the same voters who say they hate them.

This is not a failure of democracy. This is a failure of accountability. And it is entirely, completely, uncomfortably our fault.

Our federal leaders have perfected a particular craft: the art of looking busy while accomplishing nothing. They hold press conferences about problems that have existed for thirty years. They tweet their outrage. They send fundraising emails about the very crises they have had the power to address and chose not to. They have turned the appearance of effort into a full-time career, and we have funded every minute of it.

Left, Right, Same Result

This is not a partisan observation. This is just arithmetic.

Democrats held the White House, Senate, and House simultaneously and still couldn’t deliver on the foundational promises they had been making for a generation. Republicans have done the same. Both parties have had unified control of government and both have spent that power expanding it, rewarding donors, and kicking the actual hard decisions to the next Congress.

The national debt has been a crisis demanding urgent action for forty years. Leaders from both parties have stood at podiums and called it exactly that. The debt is now over $35 trillion. At some point, the word ‘urgent’ stops meaning anything.

The border. Healthcare costs. Veterans care. Infrastructure. Pick any issue that affects ordinary Americans in their daily lives, and you will find a bipartisan trail of press releases, committee hearings, task forces, and blue-ribbon commissions stretching back decades. What you will not find is resolution. Because resolution ends the fundraising.

The Career Politician Is the Problem

We have allowed elected office to become a career. In some cases, a dynasty. There are sitting members of Congress who have been in Washington longer than most of their constituents have been alive. These are not people who went to serve and came home. These are people who discovered that serving is the best gig they ever had, and they have no interest in leaving.

When your job security depends on the problem continuing to exist, you don’t solve the problem. You manage it. You message it. You hold it up every two or four or six years and say, ‘They want to take this away from you. Only I can stop them.’ And we write the check.

There is a direct line between career politicians and policy stagnation. It is not complicated. People who need to keep getting elected cannot afford to make difficult decisions. Difficult decisions create opponents. So they make no decisions at all, dress it up in procedure and partisanship, and go home for the weekend.

The Audacity of Low Standards

We have accepted standards for our elected leaders that we would never tolerate anywhere else. If a surgeon had the results our Congress has, they’d lose their license. If a contractor built you a house with this quality of workmanship, you’d sue them. But a Senator can spend thirty years failing to solve any of the problems he was sent to solve, and we call him an institution.

We watch leaders who trade stocks with inside knowledge of legislation they write. We watch them exempt themselves from laws they impose on everyone else. We watch them show up for the camera and disappear for the vote. And then we argue about which party is worse, as though the problem is the jersey and not the player.

The problem is the player. The problem is that we have spent so long sorting ourselves into tribes that we stopped asking whether anyone on our team can actually do the job.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

Accountability is not yelling at your television. It is not sharing an outrage post at midnight. It is not donating to the other team’s opponent because you’re angry. Real accountability is specific, informed, and consequential.

It means knowing your representative’s voting record, not just their talking points. It means showing up in primaries, which is where most of the real decisions get made and where almost nobody votes. It means being willing to vote against your own party when your own party sends you someone who has demonstrated they have no intention of doing the work.

It means accepting that ‘but the other side is worse’ is not a governance standard. It’s a hostage negotiation, and we keep agreeing to the terms.

The System Isn’t the Problem. We Are.

Here is the part that should keep you up at night. The problem is not just that our politicians are ineffective. The problem is that many of them are not actually in charge of anything.

Think about what you have watched happen in real time. Wars launched without congressional votes. Budgets written by lobbyists and dropped in front of members who have hours to read them. Regulatory agencies staffed by the executives of the industries they are supposed to regulate. Federal contracts flowing to donors with a reliability that has nothing to do with merit. The same foreign policy goals pursued across administrations of opposite parties, as though the people at the top of the ticket are largely decorative.

Your elected representative is, in many cases, a spokesperson. They show up for the cameras. They vote how they are told. They read the talking points. The actual decisions, the ones that determine where the money goes, which wars get started, which industries get protected, which investigations get quietly buried, those happen in rooms your representative is not in, made by people you did not elect and cannot remove.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the mundane, documented reality of how Washington operates. Donor class priorities become policy. Defense contractors get their wars. Pharmaceutical companies write their own regulations. Media conglomerates shape the narrative. And the person whose name is on the ballot is left to explain it all to constituents who are increasingly sure they are being lied to, because they are.

The Constitution is not broken. The framework still works. What is broken is the pretense that the people we elect are actually the ones governing. We have built an elaborate theatrical production around the idea of self-government while the real decisions get made offstage. We are arguing about the actors when we should be asking who wrote the script.

We do not just have a personnel problem. We have a captured system, staffed by people who are either in on it or too comfortable to fight it. And the only way that changes is if the people doing the hiring, meaning us, stop accepting the performance as a substitute for the real thing.

Your Money Is Gone. Nobody Is in Trouble.

For years, anyone who raised serious questions about how the federal government spends money was dismissed as a crank. Then DOGE started publishing receipts, and suddenly the cranks look like the only adults in the room.

Hundreds of billions in COVID relief fraud. Payments to dead people. Contracts that exist in no procurement system. Agencies funding programs that nobody can locate. The Pentagon has failed its audit. Again. For the seventh consecutive year. The Pentagon cannot account for trillions of dollars in assets and liabilities, and the response from Congress has been roughly the equivalent of a shrug.

If you ran your household finances the way the federal government runs its books, you would be in prison. The people running the federal government get reelected. Some of them get committee chairmanships. The ones who complain the loudest about waste are often the same ones who steered the most pork back home and called it economic development.

The fraud is not a bug in the system. At this point, it is a feature. Money moves through Washington in ways that serve the people moving it, not the people who earned it. And the leaders with the authority to demand real answers have spent decades finding reasons not to ask the questions.

The Epstein Files and the Silence That Followed

Call it a conspiracy theory or a hoax if it makes you feel better. That label has become a way to avoid engaging with facts that are uncomfortable. Here is what is not a theory: Jeffrey Epstein ran a trafficking operation for years. He had a private island. He had a flight log. He had powerful clients. He died in federal custody under circumstances that remain disputed. And the people whose names appear in those documents are, with very few exceptions, walking around free.

The files have been partially released. What is in them is not nothing. What is in them is, at minimum, evidence that powerful people were doing things that, if any ordinary American did them, would result in prosecution. The question that never gets a satisfying answer is why the accountability stops where it does.

This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. Names connected to those files cross every line. That is precisely why nothing happens. When both sides of the aisle have exposure, both sides of the aisle have an incentive to let the story fade. Committee hearings get scheduled and then quietly deprioritized. Witnesses develop memory problems. The news cycle moves on because the news cycle is very easy to redirect when the right people want it redirected.

The victims don’t get that luxury. They don’t get to move on. And neither should we.

The Slush Fund They Voted to Keep Secret

In 2017, reporting revealed that Congress had been operating a secret fund, drawn from taxpayer money, to quietly settle sexual harassment and misconduct claims against members. No public disclosure. No named members. No consequences. Just a check written with your money to make the problem disappear, and a nondisclosure agreement to make sure you never found out.

When legislation was introduced to require disclosure of which members had used this fund, it failed. Members of Congress, from both parties, voted to protect the secrecy of a fund that existed specifically to shield them from accountability for their own conduct.

Let that land. The people who write the laws voted to exempt themselves from the basic transparency they would demand of anyone else. And a large portion of them will go home and get reelected.

I want to be direct about something here. I am a Republican. I have spent years doing the unglamorous work of grassroots organizing in Eastern Washington. I have knocked doors, made calls, built coalitions, and invested real time into this party because I believe in its principles. That investment does not come with a loyalty oath to people who betray those principles the moment they land in Washington.

When our own congressional representatives vote against transparency, vote against letting the public know who used a taxpayer-funded slush fund to cover up misconduct, they don’t get a pass because they have an R next to their name. That is exactly the kind of thinking that got us here. The jersey is not the point. The conduct is the point.

I will take heat for writing this. People will say I’m helping the other side, that criticism from within is a gift to the opposition. Here’s my answer to that: the party cannot be worth defending if the people running it aren’t worth holding accountable. If we can’t say that out loud, we have already lost something more important than an election.

The Double Standard Is the Message

There is a pattern here that goes beyond any single scandal. Fraud at scale. Files implicating the powerful. A secret fund to cover up misconduct. What connects all of it is not ideology. It is insulation. The people at the top of our political system have constructed, brick by brick, a structure that protects them from the consequences that would destroy anyone else.

When a regular citizen commits fraud, they get prosecuted. When the government commits fraud, it gets a larger budget. When a regular citizen covers up misconduct, they face consequences. When Congress covers up misconduct, they vote to keep the cover-up funded. When a regular citizen’s name turns up in a trafficking investigation, their life is over. When a powerful person’s name turns up, the investigation quietly winds down.

This is not about being cynical. Cynicism is passive. This is about being clear-eyed enough to stop pretending that the problem will fix itself, that the right election will turn the tide, that the next candidate will be different.

The hiring committee is still us. And it is past time we started acting like it.

We Have Been Paying for Wars That Were Never Ours to Fight

Supporting the military is not the same thing as supporting every decision made by the people who deploy it. That distinction matters, and a generation of Americans has learned it the hard way.

Millennials came of age watching the towers fall. We were in elementary school, middle school, just starting our lives. The reaction was understandable. The grief was real. The resolve was real. And then we watched that resolve get channeled into twenty years of decisions that accomplished something remarkably close to nothing, at a cost that will take decades to fully calculate.

Afghanistan. Twenty years. Trillions of dollars. Thousands of American lives. Tens of thousands more returned home carrying wounds that don’t show up on an X-ray. And then, in the summer of 2021, the Taliban walked back into Kabul and reclaimed the country in a matter of days. Two decades of nation-building, gone in a week. The people who made those decisions retired comfortably. The people who executed them are still waiting on disability claims.

Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction that were not there. The sectarian chaos that followed the removal of a government we decided we didn’t like. The rise of ISIS in the vacuum we created. Thousands of Americans dead. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. A region destabilized in ways we are still managing today. The architects of that war became cable news commentators. They write books. They give speeches.

And then Libya. Syria. The proxy wars that don’t get named as wars because no formal declaration was ever made, because that would require a vote, and a vote would require accountability. We armed factions we couldn’t vet, in conflicts we couldn’t define, toward outcomes we couldn’t articulate. And when those situations deteriorated, as they inevitably did, the answer was always some version of ‘the alternative would have been worse.’

And now Iran. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale offensive against Iran. Seven American soldiers are already dead. Hundreds of thousands of people across the region are in the crossfire. Iran is retaliating against US bases, Gulf states, and civilian infrastructure from Lebanon to the Strait of Hormuz. The global economy is rattled. Gas prices are spiking at home. And the question that never gets a clean answer is still the same one: what does victory look like, and who decided we were in this?

The administration says it is defending the American people from an imminent threat. The Defense Intelligence Agency assessed in 2025 that Iran was a decade away from missiles capable of reaching the United States. Negotiations were active. Mediators said a deal was within reach. Then the bombs fell, the talks collapsed, and now we are in it again, with no defined endgame, no congressional declaration of war, and the bill already running into the tens of billions.

This is the pattern. The justification arrives polished and urgent. The exit strategy is vague or absent. The costs land on the people who had no vote in the decision. And by the time the full accounting comes due, the people who made the call have moved on.

Maybe. But the families burying their kids don’t get to litigate counterfactuals. They just get the flag.

America First Has to Mean Something

If America First is a governing principle and not just a bumper sticker, then it has to mean something concrete. It has to mean that before we commit American lives and American treasure to a conflict, we ask a harder set of questions than we have been asking. What is the objective? What does victory look like? What is the exit? And most importantly: is this genuinely a threat to the American people, or is it a threat to someone else’s interests that we have been convinced, through the usual combination of fear and abstraction, to treat as our own?

The same leaders who talk about America First have repeatedly supported interventions that put American sons and daughters in harm’s way for outcomes that had nothing to do with American safety or American prosperity. The words and the votes do not match. They rarely do.

Meanwhile, the money that funded those wars could have rebuilt every crumbling bridge and road in this country. It could have funded veterans’ care at a level that does not require veterans to fight a second war with the VA just to get treatment for injuries from the first one. It could have done a thousand things for the Americans who are supposed to be the first priority of a government that claims to put them first.

The Boomers Built This. My Generation Has to Live In It.

This is not an attack on a generation. It is a statement of fact about power and time. The Baby Boomers have controlled American politics, American institutions, and American foreign policy for the better part of fifty years. They inherited a country with a balanced budget, a solvent Social Security system, a manufacturing base, and a foreign policy built around hard-won lessons from two world wars. What they pass on is something different.

A $35 trillion debt. An infrastructure held together with deferred maintenance and optimism. A foreign policy establishment that still thinks in Cold War frameworks while the actual threats have moved on. Endless wars justified by logic that always seems to evaporate once the shooting starts. And a political culture so calcified, so resistant to the kind of genuine disruption that change requires, that the people who have been running things for decades still can’t seem to let go of the wheel.

Millennials and the generation behind them are not asking to tear everything down. They are asking a reasonable question: can we at least try something different? Can the people who created these problems step back and let the people who have to live with the consequences have a real voice in solving them?

Parents in their thirties are watching this closely. Dads and moms who have spent their entire adult lives in the shadow of one war or another, who have watched their tax dollars vanish into conflicts that changed nothing, who are now raising children in a country that feels less stable than the one they grew up in. They are not interested in the same recycled arguments from the same recycled leaders. They want something real. Not a slogan. Not a platform. Not a carefully focus-grouped promise that disappears the week after the election.

Real change. Actual results. Leaders who say what they mean and do what they say, regardless of which party benefits.

Enough

This generation is done being managed. Done being told that our frustration is naive, that we don’t understand how complicated it all is, that the people who made the mess are still the most qualified to clean it up.

We understand exactly how complicated it is. We have been paying the bill for the complications.

We buried classmates who went to wars built on bad intelligence and worse judgment. We came home from those wars and fought for benefits that should have been waiting for us. We watched the people who sent us write their memoirs while our friends are still on waitlists. We inherited debt we did not vote for, wars we did not start, and a political class that is still, somehow, asking for our patience.

The patience is gone. What is left is clarity. The hiring committee is still us. The next election is still ours to decide. And this generation, the one that has been lied to, sent overseas, handed the debt, and asked to keep quiet about all of it, is paying very close attention.

We are not going away. And we are done hiring the wrong people.