For nearly a decade, Democracy Fund Voice (DFV) and sister organization Democracy Fund (DF) invested in organizations seeking to make Congress a more functional national legislature by improving its capacity to legislate and conduct oversight. The Governance Program started this work in an attempt to disrupt the vicious cycle that had led to decades of erosion of Congress’ capacity to function — and resulted in Congress ceding too much of its Article One authority to other branches of government.
Starting in 2015, DF and DFV began funding advocates, academics, think tanks, and issue experts working on different aspects of congressional capacity and congressional reform, taking a field-building approach to the work. While we didn’t expect this work alone to overcome the winds of hyperpartisanship, we did believe that it had the potential to produce meaningful institutional change and to lay the groundwork for allies within Congress to capitalize on other opportunities that emerged.
And that is exactly what happened. Governance program grantees raised awareness of key institutional challenges, explained why a strong legislative branch is important to our democracy, and helped lay the groundwork for reform. When allies within Congress created a Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2019, grantees helped support and champion its work — and together with those allies made remarkable progress. We are so proud of the work that this field has done and the contributions that DF and DFV were able to make.
Beginning in 2021, DF and DFV revisited our organizational strategies. As a result of that process, we made the difficult decision for the Governance program to shift its strategy from trying to make Congress a more functional body to exploring how we can fundamentally transform our governing system so that it provides more voice to more people — a long-term initiative that fit more squarely within our new organizational strategy.
As a result, last year we ended our funding support to the congressional capacity work that was core to our program for many years. While we are no longer funding in this area, we continue to champion this field and the important work that grantees are doing. We still see this work as essential and know that it needs to continue.
As part of that commitment, we have developed a guide that describes the successes of this field in more detail and outlines our lessons learned for those supporting and involved in congressional capacity and congressional reform work. We hope this can serve as a resource to the field as organizations continue to do this important work.