This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed.
Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?
The US constitutional system was always built on "norms," good faith, and an assumption that even personally corrupt actors in power won't act to burn the whole system down, or will fear the consequences of the rule of law. It's always been the case that Congress and the Supreme Court don't have cops or soldiers at their command, so the enforcement powers of 2 out of 3 branches of the federal government rely to some extent on fears that the system will find some way to dole out consequences, or a good faith belief in the rule of law. Even Nixon resigned once the Supreme Court ruled that he had to release the tapes.
However, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that a president (at least, a Republican president) is immune from personal consequences for everything, so at this point an authoritarian-minded president can behave as a king. Congressional Republicans would likely prefer not to cede their power but more than that, they don't want to cross Trump for fear of being defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The appeal of a job that at this point almost exclusively consists of debasing oneself is beyond me.
[1] A great primer on exactly why this illegal withholding of congressional spending is unconstitutional can be found in Senator Murphy's confrontation with DHS Secretary Noem earlier this week. Murphy documents how the department is illegally impounding funds, violating Supreme Court orders, and ignoring statutory requirements - creating precisely the constitutional crisis predicted when an administration decides it can simply disregard Congress's power of the purse: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy...
Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un...
If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.
> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951
Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.
Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?
"Least productive" != "nothing"
If language collapses into describing a different reality just because of the way someone feels, then communicating is going to be difficult.
But!
That isn't to say that after the gears grind, Congress doesn't complete important and essential work, even in toxic times.
The nihilism of a blatently false claim that Congress is doing nothing just feeds into 'so let someone else do it' fervor. Untrue memes can be dangerous.
Talking about it in abstract, to make it sound like the congress ia a monolith where all are ambivalent ... is part of the problem.
So, yeah, there’s stuff they can do, and they’ve already accomplished a lot this year.