Term limits are bad. There’s very little waste and inefficiency in government.* Members of Congress are seriously underpaid.

* this one may not apply to Trump-headed governments

March 30, 2026 - 22:13 UTC

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Term limits allow legislators to govern in their final term instead of devote 50% of their time to fundrasing.

If we overhaul campaign finance and level that playing field, term limits wouldn’t be necessary.
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Yep term limits, ranked choice voting even getting rid of winner take all elections that would move us from a two party system will never overcome people not paying attention and voting on vibes.
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Underpaid??? There are Americans getting minimum wage at $7.25.
Cry me a GD River .
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Minimum wage workers aren't expected to fly across the country and have a second residence to do their jobs.
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Addendum, the vast majority of waste and inefficiency in the government is due to contractors
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they are still underpaid, it's just that they are.... uh... supplementing their income.

from a cava bag, for example.
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Congressmembers make less than a moderately successful lawyer at a mid-sized Midwestern law firm. Try maintaining two homes on that. It almost guarantees corruption.
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We're watching both the existence and very notion of Institutional Memory get destroyed in real-time and I don't know what to say other than it doesn't seem to be going very well. Good luck all.
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So there’s good evidence that short term-limits are bad. But what about the 10-20 year range?
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Bingo! Also, the purpose of government is not efficiency, is to do the things collectively that we want as a society and cannot do as individuals.
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Is that why everyone is doing insider trading? Because they're so seriously underpaid they need to cheat?
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Term limits move the power for legislation from the legislators to the professional staff and lobbyists, who actually know how the sausage is made.
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Term limits are one of those ideas that make every problem they purport to solve worse, and often much worse
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They’re underpaid but not undercompensated
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What people don't realize about term limits is that institutional knowledge will go out the door - leaving only lobbyists with that knowledge.
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Maybe representatives should care about creating a system that passes on institutional knowledge rather than holding on to office for half a century.
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I think that depends on what the term limit is. If we instituted an 18 year limit to Congress and SCOTUS, would the threat of institutional memory loss be an issue?
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Members of Congress aren't "hired" based on skills or ability. It is a popularity contest. I don't see any reason to assume we would end up with better people just because we paid them more.
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Term limits should not be based on elapsed time but by lack of outcomes.

- if you have been in legislative or executive branch leadership, and there has been no measurable lasting impact on a set of measures of national prosperity, you should be prevented from running for re-election.
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I think when we talk about term limits, most people imagine two terms. But what if we limited House members to something like 7 to 10 terms and senators to 3 or 4? Could that balance the need for institutional knowledge with the need for fresh faces?
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I have long agreed with all of these. (Including the * part. Corruption is extremely wasteful.)
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"Members of Congress are seriously underpaid."

Compared to whom?
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bsky.app/profile/femaleatlaw.bsky.social/post/3micyy5kkk22j
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US Senators making less than a starting salary at a random Big Tech is absurd. The ROI on paying them competitively in order to attract higher quality candidates to run for office would need scientific notation to express.
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This same logic also applies to all congressional aides, bureaucrats, program managers, etc.
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This assumes that any job in big tech is worth even a fraction of what it pays, meanwhile teachers and nurses and construction workers and the entire service industry are dramatically undervalued and underpaid despite the entire economy's reliance on them.
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Conditional term limits. Get two terms with no restrictions. After the 2nd term, any incumbent must get at least 40% turnout in the previous election to automatically qualify for another term . If the turnout doesn't reach 40%, the incumbent must get a petition of at least 15% of the district.
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In terms of salary. a individual trust should be set up for every Congressional Office that handles all the money that needs to be used for that office, including salaries for elected officials and staff. That office belongs to the people and the person elected is just a temporary ward.
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We need to permanently tie raises for Congress to raises also for minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Disability and Veteran's pay and benefits, for all the same reasons Congress thinks they need a raise. One for you, one for me.
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We don’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem: If you actually went through itemized budget options with most of the public they would spend more money.
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"We don’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem" I have used those exact words on so many occasions.
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This is what you say because you don't have either problem, you have an infinite amount of money in contrast to your expenses, which is proportionally inverse to the government and much more proportionally inverse to 95% of the US, and so you've become a NIMBY.
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Which is why the latest Dem proposals to cut taxes even further are so bad. The federal government is being legislated out of financial existence. Nothing but the military will get funding anymore.
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I always found it interesting how many term limits advocates were completely unaware of the argument made *against* them in the Federalist Papers.

Not that it's an infallible argument, but if you're a constitutionalist arguing for term limits, you should be aware of its existence.
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The real waste is in consulting contracts like with McKinsey
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Becoming an effective legislator takes years. Term limits supporters don't seem to understand that members of Congress need time to learn the job.
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Term limits are bad but shaming people to get out of the way for the next generation of legislators is good.
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There's already a way to do that. It's called voting.
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🛎️ 🛎️ 🛎️.
1) Term limits hand staff inordinate levels of power, 2) if only ferreting out “waste fraud and abuse” was a real thing (it’s not) and 3) yes, they are underpaid. Hard to maintain 2 households and Congress has too many fat cats and it’s only getting worse.
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Underpaid but a lot of wealthy people spend a lot of money to get those position. Wonder why?
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Michigan went to term limits for state legislators in the 1990s. Bad idea. The permanent bureaucracy had the institutional knowledge, hence the power; lawmakers have been a revolving door of mostly youngish-to-middle-aged faces who have to leave by the time they learn where the bathrooms are.
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*permanent bureaucracy and, more importantly, the lobbyists
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Hanging people based on their race and ethnicity is bad.

Maybe you should talk to Israel about that.
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idk I'm skeptical about efficiency

I think it certainly suggests *something* is very wrong when our government has to pay like 5 times what nations like France do to build transit infrastructure, for example
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I know nothing about US and French planning laws, but litigation culture would be my guess.
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These things are amazingly and counterintuitively all true.
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