DC Is ‘Moving On’ From Funding Fight With House GOP, Mayor Says

As a $1 billion budget fix for Washington DC stalls in the Republican-controlled House, Mayor Muriel Bowser said local leaders are “moving on” beyond the fight.

When the House passed a stopgap to keep the government open earlier this year, lawmakers funded DC at fiscal 2024 levels — effectively forcing a $1 billion cut to the city’s budget. The Senate passed its own budget “fix,” which President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) support, but it has languished without a House vote amid opposition from fiscal hawks.

Bowser, who has used emergency powers to lessen the impact, still wants the House to pass the fix. “This is not federal money,” she said at an exclusive Bloomberg Government round table on Thursday. “There’s not one penny saved by the federal government.”

But she’s also not sounding the same existential alarm as months ago when local officials warned of possible firings of teachers and police officers.

In Congress, “sometimes there’s a perfect brew of events that happen that gets something done,” Bowser said, citing last year’s congressional passage of a bill allowing the Washington Commanders to build a new DC stadium. “And I think something like that will happen with the CR fix.”

The third-term DC mayor is no stranger to the complex Republican politics that can impact the heavily Democratic capital city.

Bowser began serving in 2015, right before Trump took office for the first time. She said her interactions with the president have been different during his second term. He knows more about the city and its politics now, she said, and understands how his administration can impact it.

DC and the surrounding areas have ostensibly borne the brunt of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts, even as the president and his chief cost-cutter Elon Musk go through a messy public breakup.

Bowser said it’s still unclear how many residents have become unemployed, but officials should know more in October when they get further data. She said the current forecasts show the District residents would lose 40,000 jobs in the federal government or associated industry between fiscal years 2026 and 2029.

The Democratic mayor downplayed her recent efforts to repeal DC’s sanctuary city law, which some have seen as an effort to curry favor with Trump and the GOP Congress. Bowser called the law a misnomer, saying it’s narrower than a full sanctuary city provision because it deals with jails’ communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She did acknowledge that she’s needed to take into account the Republican power trifecta.

“Are we being responsive to what we see at the Hill and what we hear in rhetoric? I think so,” Bowser conceded.