House in no apparent rush to close $1.1 billion hole it blew in D.C.’s budget

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives debated a bill expressing the chamber’s resolute opposition to energy conservation regulations for commercial refrigerators and freezers. What the august legislators did not do, though, is much of anything to resolve a problem they created in D.C.’s local finances.

The lack of urgency involves a Senate bill passed earlier this month that would close a $1.1 billion hole the House blew in D.C.’s current local budget when they voted on a measure funding the federal government through September. The House's move could subject the city to painful and unnecessary midyear cuts that could impact services and result in layoffs. When the problem was pointed out by D.C. officials and crowds of irate residents earlier this month, the Senate acted quickly – and unanimously – to address it. But the House has since done, well, not much at all.

Local groups have continued advocating for the House to act, and this week more than 200 local organizations wrote to congressional leaders asking that they quickly take up the Senate bill. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton also pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office determined that passing the D.C. budget fix would cost the federal government nothing.

“The treatment of D.C. is a radical departure from decades of congressional practice and could have devastating consequences for the District,” she said in a statement. “I’m calling on Speaker Johnson to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote at the earliest opportunity.” 

If and when that happens is the, well, 1.1 billion-dollar question.

“We want to be helpful here but I don't think our leadership had a chance to decide when and how they're going to put it on the floor," said the House's head appropriator, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), to a Huffington Post reporter on Thursday.

The House’s failure to act thus far comes despite initial reporting that President Donald Trump himself was pushing for a fix, largely to address concerns that forcing D.C. to cut its budget so suddenly could pose a threat to public safety in the city. (The Metropolitan Police Department would stand to lose some $67 million in funding if the cuts happened.) That same worry was echoed last week in a letter from the National Fraternal Order of Police to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

“The impact of the most recent continuing resolution would require the District of Columbia to implement steep cuts in the middle of the fiscal year, effectively compounding the impact of these drastic reductions in ways that may harm public safety operations,” wrote FOP President Patrick Yoes.

Speaking at a community meeting in Southeast D.C. earlier this week, Interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin said he had personally called Johnson to urge him to put the bill to a vote on the House floor. “It’s going to be worked out,” said Martin. “We’re not going to lose that money.”

But whether D.C. loses something else in the process remains to be seen. Semafor reported Wednesday that some Republicans are angling to amend the Senate bill, potentially in ways that would target specific D.C. laws. “We should have a say in some of the crazy things D.C. does,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chair of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, to Semafor. (Harris’s office did not respond to follow-up questions from The 51st.)

This practice – known as budget riders – has been used for decades by congressional Republicans to block city laws and programs they disagree with. For more than a decade, for example, D.C. has been prohibited from using any funds to subsidize abortions for low-income women, and since 2015 the city has been forbidden from legalizing the sale of recreational cannabis. (That latter rider was authored by Harris.) In 2023, Republicans proposed an even broader slate of riders, including one to ban traffic cameras and another to repeal the D.C. statute allowing physician-assisted suicide, but they did not pass into law.

This week, Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, proposed a number of riders he’d like to see Republicans add to the Senate bill before it passes the House. They include forbidding D.C. from continuing to allow non-citizens from voting in local elections (a practice that started last year), banning the use of ranked-choice voting (which D.C. voters approved at the ballot box in November), and giving the U.S. Attorney for D.C. authority to prosecute all juvenile crime (which is largely done by the D.C. Attorney General now), and others.

Relatedly, on Tuesday a House committee advanced a bill that would repeal D.C.’s self-designated status as a sanctuary city, requiring it to assist with federal immigration enforcement. 

In the meantime, D.C. officials say the House-imposed budget cuts aren’t yet taking effect, largely because city agencies so far haven’t spent more than they did during the last fiscal year. But once spending does exceed those levels, Mayor Muriel Bowser will have to start identifying places to cut – and her aides have warned that layoffs would likely follow. Still, the city has ordered a freeze on most hiring and spending by agencies, both because of declining revenues in upcoming years and the continuing uncertainty over D.C.’s budget in Congress. 

“Forcing D.C. to cut $1 billion from its budget now would cause immediate and devastating cuts to local services that District residents, visitors, and workers depend on. That includes things like public transit, public safety, schools, child care, and District staff including firefighters and emergency responders, among many others,” wrote Samantha Waxman, Deputy Director of State Policy Research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this week. 

“These harms will affect every quadrant of the city and residents, commuters, and visitors as basic public services like trash collection and public safety diminish,” she added. “The impacts will fall disproportionately on people with the least means and fewest resources, and on communities of color in D.C. due to long-standing inequities in education, employment, and housing.”