When members of the House return from recess next week, they will have before them a bipartisan amendment out of the Senate that restores $1.1 billion of the District’s local dollars for the current fiscal year.
However, it remains to be seen if House Republicans will ever let the amendment see the light of day.
While D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) alluded to some contingency planning on Monday, she admitted not yet having explored the possibility of school weeks becoming shorter and other reductions in city operations. She opted instead to focus on her administration’s engagement with House Republican leadership, which includes Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.).
“The case has been made that these are … local dollars,” Bowser said. “That cutting them in the middle of the year would be devastating to our operations and to our shared goals of making our city the best, most beautiful city and one that serves our residents. So we’re very confident and we’re gonna keep working with the Congress until its final passage.”
On Monday, Bowser — flanked by D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, nine other members of the D.C. Council, City Administrator Kevin Donahue, Budget and Performance Management Director Jenny Reed, and D.C. Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee — provided members of the press with an update that, at times, lacked specificity on the nature of negotiations with House leadership, or what plans are in place should all else fail.
Lee, the only other official who spoke to contingencies, placed the onus on Bowser and the council.
“I have confidence that the mayor and council will come to at least initial decisions that will be substantive to deal with the scenario that [the continuing resolution] just being the law as opposed to the other passing through the House,” he told reporters.
During last year’s budget deliberations, Lee clashed with Bowser and Mendelson due to his insistence that the Fiscal Year 2025 allocates funds toward the replenishment of the District’s reserve account. An Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) spokesperson later told The Informer that, given the spending restriction in the continuing resolution, use of District reserves wouldn’t be an option in this situation.
In an email, they said the District has “sufficient resources” to support FY25 spending.
Before the press briefing started, Kara Hylton, mother of the late Karon Hylton Brown, interrupted Bowser, publicly questioning her involvement in President Donald Trump’s decision to pardon the D.C. police officers convicted for their role in her son’s death.
Bowser responded to Hylton, telling her that she, contrary to what Hylton has often alleged, didn’t identify her son as an undocumented resident in conversations with Trump.
As law enforcement personnel escorted Hylton out of Room G9 in the John A. Wilson Building, Bowser pivoted back to the situation on the Hill, telling reporters that the District government, now more than halfway through Fiscal Year 2025, wouldn’t have to make any immediate decisions about operations because the government hadn’t yet reached Fiscal Year 2024 spending levels.
Despite concerns about the potential $1.1 billion budget gap, and the further exacerbation of a fiscal situation OCFO predicted in early March, Bowser told reporters that she’s still scheduled to present her Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal on April 2.
While making the rounds at budget forums throughout the city this year, Bowser identified education, government operations, and capital investments among her Fiscal Year 2026 budget priorities.
She maintained a similar tenor in the aftermath of Lee’s four-year budget forecast.
However, in the midst of a retroactive budget battle, Bowser appears to be, at least, exploring the possibility of halting the construction of a new football stadium on RFK campus.
“That’s a decision that certainly,” she told The Informer, “I’ll use my best judgment to make.”
District Families Get a Real-Life Civics Lesson in the Capitol
During the latter part of last week, District parents and children, prompted by the possibility of the cuts in resources and services, converged on the Hart Senate Building for an event touted as “Recess at the Capitol.”
This act of nonviolent resistance, coordinated by Ward 8 State Board of Education (SBOE) Representative LaJoy Johnson-Law, Christina Hanson, and Jhonna Turner, allowed young people to gather on Capitol grounds, wave their protest signs, and meet the federal legislators deciding the fate of their city.
In the days that followed, District residents engaged senators mulling over the resolution that the House approved earlier in the week, at times risking detainment by law enforcement.
Hanson said “Recess at the Capitol” and other events throughout the week organized in conjunction with the Free DC coalition, EmpowerEd, Washington Teachers’ Union and CARE Washington, DC, served as a learning moment for some of D.C.’s youngest residents.
“If anything, children need to understand this is what happens when we’re not a state,” said Hanson, a former DCPS staff member and executive director of CARE Washington, DC. “Some who don’t even live in the state are saying [they’re] going to hold that money, put it in a bank account where we can’t even touch it, and if we do touch it, we get arrested.”
Earlier this year, well before Cole successfully shepherded the continuing resolution decimating D.C.’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget through the House, Hanson supported District public and public charter school students who organized a youth town hall at Trinity Washington University in Northeast.
For hours that evening, hundreds of young people spoke about their demands for Fiscal Year 2026, including upgraded academic spaces, safe passage programs, and mental health services.
Weeks later, Hanson continues to encourage young people to practice civic engagement, especially at a time when federal forces are infringing on D.C.’s limited Home Rule.
“It’s a gift to be here, but it’s also a fight,” Hanson said on March 13. “So [it’s about] keeping up that [fight] early in their mindsets just helps push it up until they graduate from college and whatever else.”
Families’ efforts wouldn’t go unseen, as seen in the Senate’s passage of an amendment on Friday night intended to reverse what congressional leaders are now characterizing as a mistake.
The Senate approved the amendment, titled the District of Columbia Local Funds Act of 2025, after the chamber passed, and Trump signed, a six-month stopgap measure to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year, but without a solution to D.C.’s $1.1 billion quandary.
The District of Columbia Local Funds Act of 2025, which keeps D.C.’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget intact, came together through the efforts of Sens. Susan Collins (D-Maine) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Virginia).
Collins and Van Hollen, authors of the three-page document, reportedly had support from Sens. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
As reported by Politico, Collins, Senate appropriations chair, assured her colleagues that Trump and Cole, House appropriations chair, stand by the amendment, which she said wouldn’t thwart efforts to decrease federal spending.
Warner also addressed the federal implications of a continuing resolution that mandates a cap on local spending at Fiscal Year 2024 levels.
“D.C. gets 26 million tourists every year. In 2026, we’re going to be celebrating 250 years, [and] we want to show off D.C. and the whole region,” Warner said on the Senate floor. “If we allow this mistake to take place, D.C. will lay off cops, it’ll close schools, it’ll shut down on trash removal, [it’ll be challenging] for those of us in the region who use Metro, dramatic cutbacks.”
DCPS, Public Charter Schools Stand to Lose Hundreds of Millions
Last spring, the D.C. Council passed a $21 billion local budget that addressed Metro’s fiscal cliff, newly solidified teacher and District employee contracts, as well as inflation and ballooning costs for teacher, firefighter and police officer retirement.
Without Collins and Van Hollen’s amendment, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) stands to lose $190 million and public charter schools, $166 million, out of that $21 billion pie. That means that teachers could be furloughed and schooltime shortened at a time when D.C. students are seeing incremental post-pandemic academic progress.
Other programs and services that are in limbo include: community schools programs, what DCPS calls the Connected Schools Model, and extracurricular programs funded with grants from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
On Thursday, DCPS student Emily Gonzalez joined her friends and other young people on the steps of the John A. Wilson Building, all in support of community schools, through which students and their families have been able to receive wraparound services. Despite public school and public charter school leaders’ embrace of the program, Emily said she’s already seeing a drawback in offerings.
“We pack food for the shelters, but this has been cut off since we…don’t receive a lot of money from foundations,” said Emily, a DCPS junior who’s currently acquiring college credits at Trinity Washington University. “We have not been able to run our club [and] we are lacking a lot of members recently because we don’t have the money to do anything for our community.”
Emily joined a marquee line-up of speakers that included D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), Scott Goldstein, founder and executive director of ElectEd D.C., DCPS special education teacher Dominique Moore, and Ward 7 SBOE Representative Eboni-Rose Thompson.
She also stood alongside Washington Teachers’ Union President Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons.
Well before Emily and others made their way down to the Hart Senate Building, she continued to reflect on the short-term and long-term effects of the drastic, and relatively sudden $1.1 billion budget cut.
“A lot of opportunities would be taken away from us,” Emily told The Informer. “Most of this money literally goes to programs that we have inside. All of the clubs we run, all of the education, the programs, everything. It benefits us and we would be less educated…and less stimulated.”
Hours later Ward 8 parent Tiye Kinlow walked through the halls of the Hart Senate Building with similar thoughts about student academic enrichment. Throughout much of Thursday afternoon, she stood alongside her daughter, a four-year-old preschooler who’s currently in a language immersion program at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Freedom Public Charter School’s language immersion program.
With more than a decade before her daughter reaches high school, Kinlow expressed anxiety about the immediate effects of the $1.1 billion funding loss.
“I don’t want the quality of [my daughter’s] school to go down in any way at all,” Kinlow said as she delved into the school’s various offerings. “They have amazing after-school [activities]. We have parent classes to help you if you are feeling uneasy, and you can just talk with other parents about what’s going on.”
“All of that, of course, is dependent on the funding,” Kinlow added.
Kinlow, whose family includes Jacqueline Kinlow of the Bellevue Neighborhood Civic Association and former D.C. Shadow Senator Eugene Kinlow, said she knows too well the fight that District residents have faced in the Home Rule era. Even so, Trump’s second ascent to the White House and recent events, Kinlow acknowledged, have intensified local affairs.
“This Senate and House has always been able to make changes to our budget, which is something that I’ve grown to be somewhat okay with,” she told The Informer. “But the fact of just stripping it completely is totally different and it feels like they don’t respect us as people to be able to have our own self-determination, to make our own decisions.”
Kinlow calls the current situation further indication that the well-being of D.C. residents get overlooked in many conversations about the nation’s capital.
“A lot of people across the nation don’t understand that D.C. is more than just the Capitol and the White House and the Supreme Court and all of our monuments,” Kinlow said. “People live here and have lived here for generations. My grandparents still live here. My dad grew up here. My parents still live on the same block as his parents.”
Ward 8 State Board Representative LaJoy Johnson-Law Speaks
Johnson-Law, a Ward 8 mother and longtime organizer, led last week’s mobilization efforts, while also preparing for the short-term and long-term effects of the U.S. Department of Education’s closure.
Months after Ward 8 voters elected her to her seat on the State Board of Education, Johnson-Law appears to be actualizing a vision where community members are making demands of the power structure— whether that be local or federal.
“Every voice deserves to be heard— period,” Johnson-Law told The Informer Thursday. “And that includes D.C. children.”
Johnson-Law went on to affirm the mass mobilization as a modern-day civil rights and human rights struggle, as it directly affects young people, many of whom are already living in a District without statehood, spread throughout communities still bouncing back from generations of disinvestment, incarceration, and trauma.
“We’re still Americans,” Johnson-Law said. “Last time I checked, is this not American soil? Don’t we pay federal tax dollars? Don’t we pay D.C. tax dollars? So why are you reducing our children to a federal agency? Why are you tying up money that D.C. brought in locally? That doesn’t even make sense.”