District of Congress? What could happen if Republicans repealed D.C.'s home rule

It’s February 20, 2027. It’s the second week in a row that your trash hasn’t gotten picked up. And you don’t even want to get started on the menacing potholes the next street over or the recreation center nearby that’s been closed for months because of a leaky roof. You’re frustrated. So you pick up the phone and start calling members of Congress. 

Sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it? What with all the critical national and international issues that the House and Senate have to deal with on a daily basis, why would any of their members have anything to say about a random rec center in a D.C. neighborhood full of people who don’t get to vote for them?

But that’s what some Republicans are seemingly pushing for. In early February, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bill that would abolish D.C.’s elected government, which has existed for just over 50 years. The underlying premise of their bill isn’t particularly discrete: They think the locals have done such a crappy job running the capital city that only the enlightened and efficient federal government could possibly save it. 

“The corruption, crime, and incompetence of the D.C. government has been an embarrassment to our nation’s capital for decades,” said Lee in a statement introducing the bill. “It is long past time that Congress restored the honor and integrity of George Washington to the beautiful city which bears his name.” 

And on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump endorsed the idea. “The federal government should take over the governance of D.C.  And run it really, really properly,” he told reporters. 

To be fair, Lee and Ogles’s bill faces steep odds, even with Republican control of Congress and Trump's support. It would need at least some Democratic support to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, not to mention a unified Republican front in the narrowly divided House. But we’re in somewhat unpredictable times, and things no one ever assumed would happen are happening — or at least being attempted.

So that got us thinking: What would a full repeal of D.C. home rule look like? And where would that leave residents who rely on locally elected officials and city agencies to run the city, whether imperfectly or otherwise? 

We don’t like playing a game of predictions; journalism is the act of telling people what happened, not so much what’s going to happen. But as William Shakespeare said, what’s past is prologue, and we don’t have to look far to guess what it would be like to have unelected federal bureaucrats running D.C.’s local affairs. In fact, that’s exactly what took place for decades before home rule was granted in 1973. 

Teaser: Start saving those phone numbers for congressional offices, because if what once happened were to ever happen again, that’s who you might be calling for all manner of municipal minutiae. 

Select all, delete

Lee and Ogles’ bill isn’t much of a legislative scalpel; it’s a sledgehammer. While the bill that Congress passed in 1973 to grant D.C. home rule was more than 60 pages long, Lee and Ogles’ attempt to repeal it doesn’t extend past a single page. (Talk about government efficiency, huh?) “Effective on the date that is 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act (Public Law 93–198; 87 Stat. 774) is repealed,” it commands. 

What does that mean in practice? In short, 50 years of local government would be erased with the stroke of a pen. The mayor, D.C. Council, and attorney general would all be out of their jobs. The more than 300 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners who serve as unpaid representatives of the city’s neighborhoods? Thanks for your service, but dismissed. Oh, and those elections that D.C. holds every two years for a variety of public offices? They just wouldn’t happen, since the D.C. Board of Elections would be zapped.

But that’s just the beginning. The city’s independent Chief Financial Officer, who ensures D.C. is spending within its means, would be gone. (The Home Rule Act requires that the annual budget be balanced; that provision would also disappear.) D.C. would lose its ability to borrow money (which is used to modernize schools and patch up roads, to name a few things), and no one would collect local taxes, since that authority is also found in the existing Home Rule Act. 

The city’s annual contributions to Metro would also be imperiled, and local government would eventually grind to a halt as all types of contracts the city relies on would be thrown into legal uncertainty. Any contract worth more than $1 million has to be approved by the council, and, well, the council wouldn’t exist any longer.

‘It is as silly as it is impractical’

Of course, it seems unlikely that Lee and Ogles would repeal 50 years of local governance and replace it with nothing. Their bill does give a year between its passage and a full repeal of home rule, after all, indicating that some alternative would be crafted in the interim. What would that alternative look like? 

At this point, we don’t know — neither Lee nor Ogles’s offices responded to requests for more details. (Maybe they and Trump have concepts of a plan?) But for some critics, that the bill doesn’t contemplate any alternatives at all hints that it’s more about symbolism than substance.

“To me, the lack of thought around the alternatives suggests this is not a genuine attempt to improve governance,” says Vanessa Batters-Thompson, executive director of the D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. “It’s a symbolic bill demonstrating Congress’s dominion over D.C. residents. A well-thought-out bill would include more specifics on the alternatives to home rule.”

But with history as our guide, we can make some educated guesses about what a post-home rule D.C. would look like. 

The city in its very early years did have brief flirtations with local government, including an elected mayor and council – and even a governor, albeit one appointed by the president. But from 1874 until 1967, D.C. was governed by three co-equal commissioners — two appointed by the president and the third by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to manage the city’s infrastructure. (From 1967 until 1975, a single commissioner and nine-person council were appointed by the president to run the city.) There was a bureaucracy below the commissioners to run schools, pave roads, and provide clean water, but D.C. was nominally managed by the governing trio — with Congress serving to write the city’s laws and fund the local government.

How well did the system work? D.C. certainly grew and was modernized under the rotating cast of commissioners. But challenges and inefficiencies eventually became clear.

“The commissioner system was insufficient in running a much smaller and less complicated bureaucracy” than what D.C. has today, says Michael Fauntroy, a professor of political science at George Mason University and author of “Home Rule or House Rule? Congress and the Erosion of Local Governance in Washington, D.C.,” which traces the history of congressional interference in the city’s local affairs. “I can't see how a return to that would improve things.”

It’s not just Fauntroy who believes this — even some of those involved in running D.C. before home rule seemed to think the system was overly complicated and inefficient. 

“The present administration of the city, divided in responsibility and dispersed in power, make only for delay and inaction and for frustration on the part of the governors and those governed,” said W.N. Tobriner, a Democrat who served as one of the three commissioners from 1961 to 1967, according to a Washington Post report.

John B. Duncan, a fellow commissioner, agreed: “Under the present form of rule, the government cannot always deliver what the people want, because the commissioners have no final authority over money or legislation,” he said, referring to the role Congress played.

And that Congress would involve itself in daily municipal matters was also a source of frustration – including for the very members of Congress who had to do it. “[Members of the House and Senate] constitute themselves the common council of a city government — it is as silly as it is impractical,” said Sen. Theodore Burton (R-Ohio) during a discussion on home rule in 1943. 

“D.C. Matters By Handfuls Await Action Of Congress: Hearts Elsewhere, Lawmakers of U.S. Must Grapple With Local Budget, Crime,” read a Washington Post headline in 1952, describing some of the “city alderman’s chores” that were left to the House and Senate. And in 1960, the newspaper cheekily highlighted one critical issue the country’s national legislature would have to tackle in D.C.: “Along with the gold outflow, the Cuba situation and the pursuit of outer space, the next Congress will have to face up to some inflammatory issues facing the District. One of these is whether dogs should be kept on leashes while in public.” 

Congress also debated whether D.C. firefighters should be able to participate in the police band, and had to vote on legalizing the flying of kites in the city. Oh, and they legislated that anyone looking to own a dog in D.C. would have to pay 25 cents in fees to the government. And daylight saving time? Congress had to pass an annual bill to make that happen in D.C. (Sometimes it failed at even this, leaving D.C. in a time zone of its own.)

That these issues were left to Congress, instead of locally elected officials, was a source of frustration for Republican Commissioner Robert E. McLaughlin, who argued in the early 1960s that devolving power would “free Congress from worrying about such details as dog-pound sites in the midst of national and international problems.”

Of course, for decades Congress decided to retain those powers – largely because many members did not want D.C.’s majority-Black population to have its own local government. 

Crime and congress

OK, fine. The examples above seem like surprisingly silly insights into the role Congress played as the city’s government. But how did the commissioners and Congress fare on more serious matters, like crime — the very issue Lee and Ogles say concerns them now? (Trump agreed, saying, “We should save people from being killed.”) But how well did the pre-home rule government manage public safety?

Per McLaughlin, not very. In 1961, he said congressional inefficiency was only making public safety worse. Members of Congress, he said, “have no basic responsiveness to the residents or problems of this city,” so much so that it raised the question “whether any municipal government can be appropriately run by Congress.” 

The following year, a Washington Post headline seemed to drive the point home: “Congress Blamed for District Crime.” In the article, Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-Connecticut) said the national legislature had failed to do its part in stemming a dramatic spike in violent crime. “We have the responsibility of providing better police facilities, better court facilities, better laws and improved social conditions,” he remarked.

Even President Richard Nixon recognized that federal control over D.C. was falling short. In public remarks in 1969, Nixon said that even with its vast powers, the federal government could only do so much in solving the city’s local problems — especially when it came to addressing generations of racial segregation. “We must recognize that without a strong local government, without real home rule, and without the support of the citizens, the people of Washington, the federal activities will come to naught,” he said.

Even fast-forwarding to today, the role of Congress is making D.C. safer is questionable. The Senate is responsible for confirming judges to D.C.’s courts, which handle more than 51,000 criminal and civil cases every year. How is that going? There’s a vacancy crisis leading to court backlogs – and it’s not the first time.

All told, Batters-Thompson notes that another current-day example of federal control in D.C. shows that neither Congress nor the federal government is inherently better at serving the city. In some cases, she says, they can be notably worse.

“The majority of our parkland is owned by the National Park Service. We have $1.6 billion in deferred maintenance on NPS parkland across D.C. If the federal government wants to beautify D.C., they could clear that maintenance backlog for NPS-owned properties in the city,” she says. “The federal government hasn’t always done a great job as a custodian of D.C. And I am not seeing suggestions in the bill about how this will be different and how they will improve on the failures of the past.”

A counterpoint: the Control Board

Now, there is an alternative arrangement that Lee and Ogles could be contemplating that has been proven to be more successful: the control board. First deployed by Congress in 1995 to address a significant financial crisis in D.C., the five-person board assumed significant powers to run the city (the mayor and D.C. Council remained, albeit with more limited roles) — and helped stabilize the D.C. budget within three years.

But even the control board conceded that the conditions that sparked D.C.’s financial crisis weren’t all of the city’s making. Many, in fact, stemmed from conditions the city inherited when it gained home rule. (That included unfunded pension liabilities, the city’s inability to tax significant amounts of property or commuters, and more.) The board not only helped stabilize D.C., but it also worked with Congress to address some of those problems.

Might Lee and Ogles be looking for another control board? Maybe, but we don’t know since they didn’t respond to our questions. (Guys, we’re waiting!) Even if that were the case, it’s of course questionable whether the conditions that exist would merit a control board. D.C. recently celebrated its 28th consecutive balanced budget, it has almost two months of money on hand to fund the government should revenues suddenly dry up, and its bond ratings are about as good as you can get. (In response to Trump’s comments, on Wednesday night Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted a list of why D.C. is a world-class city – leading with fiscal indicators.)

There is, of course, one limited yet quick option for Trump: He could take over the Metropolitan Police Department, as the Home Rule Act allows. But even that power is limited: there has to be an emergency, and the president can't run MPD forever. And that wouldn't touch the rest of the D.C. government or its elected officials.

So, what does this all mean? 

Again, we need to restate the obvious realities here. Lee and Ogles’ bill faces significant legislative odds; it would need significant buy-in from their colleagues on the Hill to even come close to passage, and Republicans may ultimately decide that they’re more happy to keep interfering with D.C. in a piecemeal fashion through the usual tools at their disposal, like the federal budget. (That’s where they include provisions requiring D.C. to do certain things — and prohibiting it from doing others.)

And even if the bill does pass, the year between passage and implementation would give Congress time to find an alternative to the city’s existing elected leaders and government. (Sen. Lee, Rep. Ogles: Call us! We’d love to hear details.)

But let’s say Congress does decide to bring back some type of presidentially appointed commissioners to manage D.C., and itself returns to its former role as the city’s legislature and funder. (All while continuing to deny the city voting representation in the House and Senate, of course.) Well, as Aesop warned: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.”

D.C.’s 700,000 residents and the many more people who come into the city to visit and work won’t suddenly stop requiring basic services. You could leave the entire D.C. government’s bureaucracy intact but at some point, someone will have to make executive decisions — and find a way to pay for them. 

How many members of Congress will sign up for the annual task of reviewing and approving a budget for the city? (Recall that Congress rarely manages to even pass an annual federal budget.) How many members will want to attend regular oversight hearings? Or, even worse, field phone calls from D.C. residents who are frustrated with local government services? 

These aren’t novel concerns, either. In January 1963, Washington Post reporter and editor Elsie Carper penned an open letter to the 535 members of the incoming Congress about the responsibilities of running a major American city. 

“As a member of Congress, you are now a member of the most unwieldy city council ever devised in the name of democracy,” she wrote. “During the next few months you will be hearing a great deal about District problems — about overcrowded schools, snarled traffic, inadequate recreation programs, about the welfare programs mess and crime out of hand. At times it will be a great chore and perhaps a big bore, but how well you do your job will determine what kind of city this is going to be.”

Should Lee and Ogles get their way, it’s doubtful that D.C. residents would venture to make Congress’s newfound responsibilities over the city any easier. Earlier this month, Ward 1 ANC Commissioner Sabel Harris took to X to offer her response to Lee and Ogles. “If D.C.’s Home Rule is repealed,” she wrote, “I can’t wait to submit all of my 311 requests to members of Congress.”

Sen. Lee and Rep. Ogles should know that in 2024, D.C. fielded 1.51 million requests for services via 311 — everything from graffiti removals and rodent inspections to parking enforcement and illegal dumping. Just imagine if those were routed to Capitol Hill offices instead – 2,822 calls for every member of Congress. (Sen. Lee’s office is reachable at 202-224-5444, while Rep. Ogles is at 202-225-4311.) A great chore, indeed.