The city's streatery guidelines are punishing small businesses and vibrant neighborhoods. We need a permanent solution to keep these staples of the city’s dining scene.
Over the past decade, D.C. voters have weighed in on whether to legalize marijuana, phase out the tipped wage, and adopt ranked-choice voting. And next year they may have to decide on the fate of a French delicacy.
The D.C. Board of Elections gave the green light this week to a proposed ballot initiative that would ban both the production and sale of foie gras — that’s the fattened liver of a duck or goose, for you commoners — in the city. The initiative is being pushed by Pro-Animal Future, an animal rights organization that last year advocated for an unsuccessful ballot measure that would have banned fur sales in Denver.
“Ending the sale of force-fed foie gras is not just symbolic, it’s a meaningful action toward a more humane and sustainable future,” says Cady Witt, the local leader of the campaign.
While production isn’t exactly likely in D.C., banning its sale could put a crimp in some local restaurants’ menus. Le Diplomate, the buzzy 14th Street restaurant, serves a $19 foie gras parfait, for one. Still, the D.C. Coalition Against Foie Gras lists a number of restaurants that have already stopped serving it.
As with every ballot initiative, the next big obstacle is collecting signatures from five percent of D.C.’s registered voters — some 25,000 signatures in all — to get the measure on the 2026 ballot.
Decoupling sounds like a lawyerly way to refer to a breakup, and in a sense that’s what D.C. is doing with the federal government.
On Tuesday, the D.C. Council approved an emergency bill that decouples 13 provisions of the city’s tax code from their federal counterparts. That means that instead of automatically mirroring changes that Congress makes to the federal tax code, D.C. is claiming a measure of independence in deciding its own tax policy.
The legislative separation came as a response to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the sweeping tax-cutting package that passed Congress earlier this year. Critics say the GOP bill largely favors the rich and big businesses and will cost both the federal government and many states much needed revenue.
“The tax cuts adopted by the federal government skew heavily to the very top. We’re talking about the richest 1% in D.C., those with incomes of $1.3 million or more, will see an annual tax cut of $42,000 a year,” Erica Williams, the executive director of the left-leaning D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, told The 51st. “The local tax cuts would double down on that and with the same kind of impact: money being taken out of public investments and being pushed to people at the top.”
All told, had D.C. done nothing, the city’s CFO estimated that it stood to lose more than $600 million over the next four years.
Consider Trump’s pledge to eliminate taxes on tips. That was included in the Republican bill, and since D.C. is largely tethered to the federal tax code, residents would similarly be exempted from local taxes on any tips they make. According to the city’s CFO, that could cost the city some $27 million in expected revenue over the next four years. And that’s a relatively minor amount: Some of the business tax provisions of the Republican tax bill were estimated to cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.
But some city lawmakers didn’t just decouple — they also quickly identified initiatives they wanted to fund with the money that would otherwise have been lost. Under an amendment introduced by Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker and Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin, roughly half of the revenue the council saved will go to restore D.C.’s Child Tax Credit (which Bowser had repealed in her 2026 budget) and increase the local match of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit — programs that largely benefit low-income residents.
But the move wasn’t without debate. D.C. Council Chairman Mendelson and At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson objected on procedural grounds, arguing that decisions about how to spend the funds shouldn’t be made at the last-minute and without more public input. (“Us doing tax policy on emergency is crazy,” said Henderson.) And Parker and Frumin’s attempt to restore a tax exemption for holders of municipal bonds was derailed by At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who called the proposal a “giveaway to some of the wealthiest people in our city.”
The debate over decoupling isn’t over, though. The council moved quickly this week because some of the provisions in Trump’s tax bill are retroactive, so undoing them locally would have to happen before the end of the year. But there are more than 80 federal tax provisions that were changed by Republicans, and Mendelson says discussions about further steps will continue into next year.
The D.C. Council blinks
In a staring contest, the person who blinks first loses. And this week, the D.C. Council blinked.
The stare down was with Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the point of contention was overspending by city agencies under her leadership. Last year, six agencies — led by the Department of Human Services and the Metropolitan Police Department — spent $325 million more than what the council had initially budgeted. This year, the pattern is largely repeating.
Bowser’s aides say it is part and parcel of running a city; budgets are built on estimates, and unexpected things come up. They also argue that some overspending is hard to avoid, pointing to significant overtime incurred by MPD because they say the department doesn’t have enough officers.
But in a series of public hearings over the last two months, Mendelson has taken Bowser’s team and CFO Glen Lee to task. He accused them of not having enough fiscal discipline to keep spending under control and said that undermines the council’s role as the keeper of the purse strings. "It appears we pass a budget that has no meaning. What’s the point of the budget?" he asked last month.
Lee has countered that the council itself has been part of the problem, regularly approving supplemental budgets and requests from Bowser to move money around to cover overspending. If the council wants to make a point, he told Mendelson, it can always vote to turn down such requests — known in official lingo as reprogrammings.
And so Mendelson attempted to do just that this week, proposing that the council disapprove a relatively minor reprogramming — moving $5.5 million from the Office of Unified Communications and Department of Corrections to help pay for MPD’s significant overtime bill, which is estimated to be more than $100 million for the fiscal year that just ended in September.
“It’s time to fire a shot over the bow that we are getting more serious about controlling spending,” he said. “What these agencies do is they overspend. Some are serial overspenders, and then the CFO and executive just reprogram money. We need to stop that cycle.”
Mendelson’s colleagues seemed to be itching less for this fight, in part because of the consequences. Had the council rejected the move, MPD’s leadership could have been found to be in violation of the city law that forbids any agency or individual to spend more money than appropriated.
Ultimately, Mendelson blinked, pulling back on his threat. But he didn’t quite concede defeat.
He told The 51st that his hearings have put both Bowser and Lee on notice and that he expects agencies will start showing more spending discipline and transparency. To that end, Lee is telling city agencies that they have to more accurately estimate how much overtime they might incur every year — and factor that into their spending plans at the start of the year.
“I decided it was adequate to send a warning,” Mendelson said.
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