DC announces ‘extraordinary measures’ after House fails to pass budget fix

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Tuesday that the district will begin to implement a list of “extraordinary measures” — from hiring freezes to potential furloughs — because of the potential for severe budget cuts after the failure of the GOP-majority House to pass a fix requested by President Trump.

Bowser said in an order set to take effect “immediately” that the local government is imposing freezes on “the hiring of new employees and contract staff” with some exceptions, as well as a freeze on overtime “for work performed after April 27.”

The order also calls for the city administrator to present the mayor with a plan by April 25 to further reduce expenditures through the “furloughing of District Government employees” and the closure of facilities, with exceptions for public schools, some health facilities and shelters.

The order comes after Congress left town on recess last week without passing legislation to prevent significant budget cuts for Washington. The measure faced staunch opposition from some conservatives, even after it was swiftly approved last month by the Senate and as Trump publicly called for its passage in the GOP-held House.

D.C. officials say the legislation is necessary to fix what lawmakers on both sides have suggested was a mistake in a separate, larger funding bill passed by Congress in March to prevent a shutdown.

Unlike previous stopgap funding bills, the latest was missing language allowing D.C. to spend its local budget — which consists mostly of funds from local tax dollars, fees and fines — at already approved 2025 levels.

D.C. was granted what’s known as “home rule” in the 1970s, but its budget is still approved by Congress.

Without that language in the bill, D.C. officials say the district was treated like a federal agency and forced to revert to 2024 spending levels, which they argue would result in them being forced to cut $1 billion in the last half of the fiscal year.

The District of Columbia runs its government on local taxes, but Congress maintains control of its budget.

To blunt part of that blow, D.C. officials told Congress this week that they plan to use authority granted in a 2009 law to increase its fiscal 2025 local fund appropriations “by an aggregate amount not exceeding 6 percent of the amounts included” in its fiscal 2024 budget and financial plan.

“What we’re doing is a stopgap. It doesn’t address the issue,” Bowser said Monday, while calling for further action from Congress, noting the move will still leave “hundreds of millions of dollars of money that we have that will be in the bank that cannot be used on critical service for the residents of the District of Columbia.”

“When you talk about cutting $400 million and in some ways it is, it’s hard to call it a cut, because the money is available, it’s not like we’re talking about cutting services, because we don’t have the money. We do have the money,” she said. “We have to have an approved appropriation from the Congress to spend our own money, and given the amount of time we have left in our fiscal year, six months there, I can’t … take off the table job impacts.”

She also reiterated that the bill in question “doesn’t save one penny of federal dollars.”

As lawmakers prepared to leave for recess last Thursday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said the D.C. budget fix had been placed on the back burner as GOP leadership in both chambers worked to adopt a budget resolution to advance the president’s sweeping tax priorities. 

“That’s still been a discussion, and we want to get that done as soon as we can,” he told The Hill at the time. “We’re having conversations with D.C., with the president and the Senate, and so we’re going to get there.”

The holdup in the House also comes as GOP leaders have been facing pressure from their right flank to attach potential riders and requirements the Democratic-led district would need to meet to spend its local dollars.