The spring’s high-profile Capitol Hill hearings with the heads of Facebook, Twitter and Google should have been a chance for lawmakers to demonstrate to the American public why Congress is such an important institution.

Since early 2017, concerns about how tech giants were securing and using the personal information of hundreds of millions of social media users had escalated to alarm. Still, despite bipartisan agreement on the growing need for regulations to better protect privacy and prevent social media platforms from being used to spread lies and hate speech, lawmakers haven’t lived up to their oversight task. Months later, they’ve made no significant headway — no bills tackling the issue have received markups or are moving on the floor.

The hearings were perhaps more useful as an illustration of the decline of policy expertise on the Hill, and how Congress has increasingly relinquished its policy-crafting responsibilities to the executive branch and private sector.

Lawmakers at the hearings appeared to have a poor understanding of social media fundamentals and were unprepared to offer policy solutions.

In April, when Orrin G. Hatch, the retiring octogenarian Republican senator from Utah, asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees how his company made money since it did not charge user fees, the 34-year-old company founder responded with a noticeable smirk: “Senator, we run ads.”