Everything you need to know about the D.C. Council

I’ve been writing and reporting on the D.C. Council for years, and it’s easy to assume that everyone else has the same nerdy interest in our distinct legislative branch and the role it plays in governing our fair city. Many people have lives, though, so I’ll concede that deciphering the council’s processes and the sometimes convoluted path a bill takes to become a law isn’t what you might consider a fun weekday activity.

But it does occupy plenty of my time, so we figured it might be useful to put this all down in writing for you. 

Despite its small size – it only has 13 members in a single chamber – the council is extremely active throughout the year, and offers good opportunities for public input and engagement. Its portfolio is far broader than even much larger legislatures in many cities, counties, and states. That’s because our council technically operates as all three. It also does things that many other legislatures don’t, including reviewing and voting on city contracts worth more than $1 million. 

So read on for most everything you should know – and can then show off at the next trivia night – about our local legislature.

Where does the council meet?

The D.C. Council finds its home at the John A. Wilson Building at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, across the street from Freedom Plaza. The building also houses the mayor’s office, so you’d be justified in calling it City Hall (though D.C. operates as a city, county, and state). 

How many councilmembers are there, and who do they represent?

At full capacity, there are 13 councilmembers. (Currently there are 12, though, because of a vacancy in the Ward 8 seat.) Eight of these councilmembers represent one of the city’s eight electoral wards, each of which has roughly 90,000 residents. Four councilmembers are “at large” – they represent the city as a whole – and there’s the D.C. Council Chairman. All but two of the councilmembers are currently Democrats, with two at-large members being independent. (More on this in a bit!)

The councilmembers serve four-year terms on staggered election cycles so that only half the council is up for re-election during any one election year. Last year the seats in wards 2, 4, 7, and 8 were up, as were two at-large seats. In 2026, it’ll be wards 1, 3, 5, 6, along with the two remaining at-large members and the council chairman. (There’s a special election on July 15 to fill the Ward 8 seat.)

Fun fact: Being a councilmember is technically a part-time job, albeit one that pays $167,000 a year, with the chairman taking in $240,000. Our local lawmakers are allowed to hold  outside employment, though none of them currently do. In the past, councilmembers have served as law professors and worked at law firms (those arrangements periodically raised concerns around potential conflicts of interest).

Is there a leader of the council? And what do they do?

There is indeed a leader-of-sorts: the D.C. Council Chairman, currently Phil Mendelson. The chairman is elected by the city’s voters; this position isn’t chosen by members of the council the way a Speaker of the House might be selected in a state legislature or in the House of Representatives. 

The chairman presides over the council’s legislative meetings, chairs the council’s Committee of the Whole (which is comprised of the whole council, exactly as the name implies), assigns other members to specific committees, manages the council’s review of the city’s annual budget, oversees the council’s professional staff (which includes its budget office, attorneys, support staff, etc.), and stands first in the line of succession to the mayor. 

Like many a leader of a legislative body, the council chairman is something of a benevolent dictator. Mendelson has significant power to run the council as he pleases – though he does still need to seek consensus with his colleagues, being just one of 13 members.

What are the council committees, and who’s in charge of those?

There are currently 11 committees that are responsible for legislation and oversight of particular areas of the D.C. government. The Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, for example, oversees all the city agencies, offices, and commissions involved with public safety (the Metropolitan Police Department, the Department of Corrections, the Office of the Attorney General, etc.) and considers all legislation that touches on public safety or the agencies under the committee’s purview.

Here’s a full list of council committees: 

• Business and Economic Development 
• Executive Administration and Labor 
• Facilities 
• Health 
• Housing
• Human Services 
• Judiciary and Public Safety
• Public Works and Operations 
• Transportation and the Environment 
• Youth Affairs

The committees and their jurisdiction can change largely at the behest of the chairman, but they still need to get enough votes from councilmembers to approve any reorganizations. 

Each committee is made up of a chairperson and four other members, chosen at the start of every two-year council session. The chairman has the power to make the initial selections, usually by considering specific requests from councilmembers who want to chair a particular committee. (The only councilmembers who don’t chair a committee are freshmen; they have to wait until they are halfway through their term to gain a chairmanship.) The council as a whole has to vote on the proposed committee makeups, so there is an incentive for the chairman to make enough members as happy as possible – or at least to avoid angering too many of them. 

The only outlier  committee is the Committee of the Whole, which every member of the council is on. It serves as the final stopping point for any legislation making its way through the council, but also oversees a broad range of city agencies – from the city’s schools and WMATA to the Department of Buildings and the Office of Planning. 

Each committee has its own dedicated staff beyond what the councilmember has in their personal office. 

How does a bill become a law?

If you ever watched Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill,” you’ve got most of the basics of how legislation makes its way through the D.C. Council. 

Someone introduces a bill, it gets assigned to a committee, a public hearing is held, the committee makes changes to the bill (a “markup,” in cool government lingo), it moves up to the Committee of the Whole (where more changes can be made), and eventually lands before the full council for two votes (known as readings, in more sweet government vernacular) that have to happen at least two weeks apart. After, it’s off to the mayor, who can sign or veto the bill. If the latter happens, it heads back to the council for an override vote, which takes two-thirds of members to succeed. 

But that’s only one type of bill.

Wait, there’s more than one type of bill?

Yep. Besides your regular run of the mill legislation,here are three more types of bills to consider: resolutions, emergency bills, and temporary bills.

• Resolutions: In many cases, these are ceremonial – measures to recognize notable people or events, etc. (The “Old People Are Cool Recognition Resolution of 2025” passed earlier this month. Yes, really.) But resolutions are also the mechanism to approve or disapprove of mayoral nominees for key positions in the government, including appointments to boards and commissions and the like. Resolutions get a single vote, and don’t need mayoral review thereafter.
• Emergency bills: As the name implies, these are measures reserved for a declared legislative emergency. (Which is a term of political art; we’re not talking about actual fires here.) The bills skip the hearing and committee process and take a single vote and mayoral signature to pass into law. However, they’re only in effect for 90 days, they can’t actually cost the government money to implement, and they require a supermajority to pass. 
• Temporary bills: These are similar to emergency bills, though they stay in effect for 225 days. These are often used to extend the period that an emergency bill can stay in effect, giving the council time to work on a permanent version. They do require two council votes and mayoral approval.

Any and all bills that make their way through the council can be found here. Pro tip: If you want a really good summary of what a bill purports to do and what people said about it at public hearings, look for the committee report that’s produced before it gets to any votes. (Here’s an example.) The Council Office on Racial Equity also produces good summaries and analyses of most bills, and the D.C. Auditor publishes frequent reports that help inform the council’s work.

Where does Congress come in?

Every bill the council passes and the mayor signs heads down Pennsylvania Avenue to Congress, where the nation’s legislature gets 30 days to review it (and twice that if it touches on the city’s criminal laws at all). During that review period, any member of Congress can introduce a disapproval resolution, essentially a means to overturn a bill passed by the council. It doesn’t happen often; the last time was in 2022, when both the House and Senate disapproved a sweeping council bill that revised D.C.’s aging criminal code. (Oh, and to make matters more complicated, the 30- or 60-day review period isn’t in calendar days, but days that either chamber is in session, which means a D.C. bill can sit on Capitol Hill for months at a time.)

To bridge the gap between when a bill is passed and when it actually becomes law, the council will often use emergency and temporary versions of the bill. 

So once the council, the mayor, and congress all sign off on a bill, it’s the law of the land … right?

Yes and no. 

Just because a bill becomes a law doesn’t necessarily mean much in a practical sense, really. That’s because many bills carry price tags: creating a new agency or cutting someone’s taxes, for example, costs money. Every bill gets a Fiscal Impact Statement – a price tag, in essence – from the city’s chief financial officer. If the council doesn’t find a way to cover that cost (by raising taxes, say, or repurposing dollars from other parts of the government), the responsibility gets bumped up to the mayor – who can simply decline to do so. That back-and-forth can condemn some bills that pass the council to a weird budgetary purgatory, where they’re not worth much more than the paper they’re written on. 

What else does the council do?

It controls the city’s purse strings, so it plays a significant role in determining what D.C. will spend money on every year. The mayor puts together a proposed budget that is submitted to the council in March or April, and the council has just over two months to review and make changes to it. The local budget the council votes on is divided into two bills: the Budget Request Act (which actually designates specific dollar amounts for agencies, programs, and services) and the Budget Support Act (a package of legislative changes to implement new initiatives in the budget). 

It also votes to approve or disapprove any government contract worth more than $1 million. That’s a significant oversight power that many other legislative bodies don’t have, but also one that’s drawn plenty of controversy over the years. Critics say that by involving itself in the contracting process, the council can inject politics into what should be technical procurement decisions. In the past there were also concerns that bidders for lucrative city contracts could grease some palms with well-timed campaign contributions, but that type of financial giving (colloquially known as pay-to-play) was outlawed in 2022. Still, proponents of the current system say that it adds a valuable layer of review to how D.C. spends money. In one example, back in 2015 the council rejected a controversial $66 million contract for health care at the D.C. Jail over concerns related to how the contractor had operated in other states.  

Can I attend and speak at council meetings?

Yes! Public hearings are just that, and since the pandemic the public has been given the chance to speak in person or virtually. Here’s the council calendar, and here’s more information on how to watch and sign up for hearings. Now, remember: the public can speak at hearings or roundtable discussions, but regular committee meetings or legislative sessions don’t include opportunities for public input. That being said, the council can sometimes feel like grown-up student government in that if you want to chat up a councilmember, there’s nothing stopping you from approaching them before or after any meeting or legislative session. 

The council also has monthly breakfasts that precede legislative sessions, and periodically hosts breakfasts with Mayor Muriel Bowser. Those are nominally open to the public, though recent changes to D.C. law give lawmakers more flexibility to close them. 

OK, so back to the beginning. What’s with the two “independent” councilmembers?

When Congress gave D.C. an elected mayor and council back in the 1970s, there was concern (largely among Republicans) that the city’s new legislative body would be dominated by Democrats. So to ensure some ideological diversity, equity, and inclusion (Republican DEI, if you will), a compromise was hatched: at least two of the four at-large members can’t be Democrats. 

Initially that meant the council included representation from both the Republican Party and the Statehood Green Party, but for the last two decades there haven’t been any members from a non-majority political party. Instead, the council’s two non-Democrats are independents – Kenyan McDuffie and Christina Henderson. This has caused some grousing from the city’s Republican Party, because they point out that those independent at-large members are usually former Democrats who drop the party affiliation in order to run for council. The last person to do this was McDuffie, who formerly represented Ward 5… as a Democrat. 

Does the council, you know, actually work?

That’s of course a personal judgement call. In my years of covering the council, I have found that most lawmakers and staff can be thoughtful, responsive, and quick to act when unexpected issues arise. That being said, the legislative process is rarely pretty; as the famous adage goes, “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”

There have been plenty of criticisms lobbed at the council over the years, many of which have led to changes in how the legislature operates. To its credit, the council has expanded the avenues for the public to testify; no longer do you have to appear in public. It also created the Council Office on Racial Equity, which does insightful analyses of legislation, and the Council Budget Office has started producing and publishing more research that can help shape how the council legislates on everything from housing to the environment. And though a somewhat minor point, the council’s social media presence is much more engaging than most of its legislative counterparts.

But there’s still a push for further change. In 2022, Erin Palmer, who challenged Mendelson for the council chairmanship, outlined a number of reforms she would institute, including appointing an independent parliamentarian (a role currently played by the chairman), creating an internal research service to help councilmembers draft bills, and reconstituting a stand-alone committee to handle everything related to the city’s schools. Others have pushed for the council to produce written transcripts of all its public sessions, and there’s currently some pushback to the council’s move to close more of its meetings to the public.

Some of the criticisms of the council are of the political variety: the council doesn’t push back enough against the mayor, legislates more than it conducts thorough oversight, gives the chairman too much authority, and just isn’t big or representative enough. (There have been periodic suggestions that it should be increased to 25 members, though that hasn’t come to pass.)