The battle between top Republicans and Washington, D.C., could see another wrinkle next month, when Congress returns to a race against the clock to prevent a government shutdown by the end of September.
Local leaders said the last shutdown showdown left the District with a roughly $1 billion budget hole after Congress overrode its local spending plans. And the looming Sept. 30 funding deadline comes as tensions between Republicans and Democrats over the District have hit a fever pitch amid President Trump’s crackdown in the capital.
D.C. Council member Christina Henderson said Friday that local leaders remain in discussions with spending cardinals on Capitol Hill to prevent history from repeating itself.
“We are continuing our conversations with our appropriators and the four corners in Congress, because we know that sometimes the politics of the White House are very different from the politics of appropriators in terms of actually doing appropriations,” Henderson said.
D.C. was granted what’s known as “home rule” in the 1970s, but its budget is still approved by Congress.
Congress in March passed a GOP-crafted stopgap to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year, or late September, at mostly fiscal 2024 levels.
But unlike previous stopgap funding bills, the measure passed in March notably left out 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.
As a result, D.C. officials said the District was forced to spend at its fiscal 2024 levels like federal agencies under the stopgap — despite running at its updated budget levels for roughly half a year.
At the time, top GOP appropriators said the long-standing provision was left out in error, despite some Democratic suspicions. But while the Senate quickly and unanimously approved a bill to remedy the issue, the House has yet to move on it almost six months later after hard-line conservatives pushed leadership to delay the measure while pressing for new “requirements” for the District to spend their local dollars.
Since then, House Republicans have led multiple efforts D.C. advocates have criticized as “anti-home rule,” including advancing legislation aimed at blocking non-U.S. citizens from voting in local D.C. elections. Some Republicans in Congress have even floated repealing home rule.
The next funding battle looms as Trump is directing a major federal crime crackdown in D.C. He has federalized the local police department, deployed more than 1,000 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital and instructed federal agents from the FBI; Drug Enforcement Agency; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and immigration enforcement to help patrol the streets.
Republicans are cheering his efforts and agitating for them to continue — even though data shared by city leaders shows crime had already been decreasing in recent years.
Trump has challenged those figures, however, and has accused the city of producing “fake crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety.” He also warned D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday to “immediately stop giving false and highly inaccurate crime figures, or bad things will happen.”
That includes what Trump described on Truth Social as a “a complete and total federal takeover of the city.”
Trump signaled interest in wading further into the city’s operations, telling reporters on Friday that he plans to ask Congress to greenlight $2 billion for improvements in the District.
“We’re going to have this place beautified within a period of 12 months,” he said.
Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, said he expects the growing clash between Trump and D.C. to take another turn.
Looking back on March’s shutdown fight, Stern said Friday that Congress’ “accidental” cut to the D.C. budget “generated an accidental test case.”
“I think what came out of it is Democrats walked away from it saying, ‘OK, we’re in a less strong position on this in public than we thought we were,’ and Republicans walked away from it saying, ‘We’re in a stronger position publicly than we thought we were,’” he said.
A YouGov survey released earlier this month found that almost half of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” disapproved of D.C.’s police being put under federal control and National Guard troops being deployed in the city.
But a closer look found a sharp divide by party identification. Less than 10 percent of respondents identifying as Democrats approved of the move, compared with 26 percent of those who identified as independents.
Meanwhile, 74 percent of Republican-identifying respondents approved the recent actions by the administration.
“Everything since then has gone in congressional Republicans’ favor about, what’s going on with D.C. and people’s thoughts about it, all the way up to Trump deploying the National Guard, and that being popular enough, if not very popular among elected Republicans, let alone, the conservative base,” Stern said.
“Because of all that, I think that’s why this is on the table is a strong thing to Republicans in a push for.”
Despite what the District called a $1.13 billion cut to its previously approved budget authority, Bowser’s office said in May that it was able to prevent layoffs, furloughs and facility closures, while protecting dollars for “public safety and public education ecosystem.”
However, it has cited a number of measures it took as a result of the reduction, including a hiring freeze that cut back on “$63 million in personnel costs,” and it made “$175 million of non-personnel services reductions” and shifted more than $200 million in spending and costs for workforce investment and housing production from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026 and 2027.
“You don’t want to have the same situation happen again,” Henderson said Friday, “whereas, you know, you’re beating the city over the head talking about you’re not doing enough on public safety, and then you’re literally saying we can’t spend our money on the thing that you told us to fix.”
“That’s nonsensical, but crazier things have happened,” she added.
