Jen Golbeck/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
The Capitol dome and Statue of Freedom are seen through budding cherry blossoms in Washington last week. The National Park Service predicts peak bloom between March 28 and 31.
San Juan Capistrano has swallows, Provincetown has whales, and spring doesn’t arrive in Washington until the cherry blossoms do. Mobs of tourists and locals will descend on the sublime white-and-pink cherry trees that circle the Tidal Basin below the Jefferson Memorial for an annual event rivaled only by the Fourth of July. It’s no small exercise to deploy the staff, volunteers, police, and cleanup crews necessary to pull together the festival that pumps millions into the District of Columbia economy.
And yet after historic and sudden federal budget cuts were signed into law last week, it would be easy to come up with a dark side to Washington’s countdown to the peak blooms expected at the end of March. The federal layoffs mean fewer National Park Service employees to clear trash, monitor crowds, and protect the trees from humanity’s most entitled humans, who habitually snap off flowers or entire branches, or climb onto trees in search of Instagrammable moments. City employees have stepped up in the past to help maintain National Park areas. But without congressional intervention, these looming cuts could leave the cherry blossom groves without federal or city employees to keep up with the chaos.
Washington is essentially a semiautonomous jurisdiction that melds state, county, and local government features. Local budget cuts are coming to the District because, after two decades of an explicit understanding that the District is not considered a federal agency, the House dispensed with that precedent, producing an immediate budget crisis. City leaders have been pleading for deliverance from more than $1 billion in potentially disastrous budget cuts that would endanger basic services for 702,000 residents and tens of millions of visitors.
In the past, the city operated under its existing spending plans, even if Congress passed stopgap measures to continue federal spending or shut down the government. But the current continuing resolution requires the District to adhere to its fiscal 2024 budget levels, just as federal agencies do.
Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) have tried to clean up this mess with a “local funds” measure that would restore the status quo ante. President Trump and Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, have said they support it. Whether the House’s wrench-in-the-works move was a one-off flex or an attempt to micromanage the District to within an inch of its existence is unknown. What’s certain is that if the House doesn’t pass the fix, the city could spiral into a period of otherwise avoidable decline.
After two decades of an explicit understanding that the District is not considered a federal agency, the House dispensed with that precedent, producing an immediate budget crisis.
Congressional interference in Washington’s affairs has been standard operating procedure since the federal government created the self-governing enclave in 1790. By the 1870s, Congress had whittled back the city’s independence, instituting a commission system that largely remained in place until the city obtained home rule in 1973. A mayor and city council run the city—until they don’t. Congress still oversees the D.C. budget, down to individual line items. The city is regularly subject to a raft of appropriations riders that challenge legislation that its city councilmembers pass. And there are always efforts, the latest coming in February, to end home rule.
Two years ago, Congress tossed out a local crime bill which they deemed insufficiently attentive to local public safety. It’s also prohibited Medicaid funding for abortions. Recreational marijuana is legal, but Congress frowned on recreational dispensaries, so the sector relies on a gifting system for cannabis purchases. (Cannabis possession remains illegal on the National Mall and in Rock Creek Park, the city’s largest, along with other federal properties.)
Washington residents did not secure the right to vote until 1961, after passage of the 23rd Amendment. Taxation without representation remains the law: It’s never been easy to cobble together congressional support for leaving the District to its own devices, giving it a voting House member, or statehood. The Democrats have never acquiesced to statehood, even when they had the numbers in both chambers.
Except for a period of fiscal instability in the 1990s, which required a financial control board, Washington has had balanced budgets and strong bond ratings. Since the onset of the current crisis, however, the federal layoffs, possible local cuts, and uncertainties in the commercial and residential real estate sectors have led Moody’s and Fitch to indicate that they may downgrade the city’s credit ratings. And of course, thanks to the federal workforce cuts, there have been sharp increases in unemployed workers and applications for unemployment benefits.
Then there are macro indicators that could prompt deeper concern on Capitol Hill, such as the failure to meet debt service payments, loan obligations, pension requirements, payroll, or interstate agreements like funding the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. The city has already allocated $200 million above its required contribution to the tristate system to stave off service cuts.
If the House declines to keep the District whole and new spending plans have to be put in place almost immediately, who makes decisions about cuts? Does Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) make the cuts independently? What input would city councilmembers have? What about residents? Will the city be able to dip into two modest reserve funds, totaling about $500 million, which have their own restrictions? Or would the city slash every department by a certain percentage?
The mayor has her own priorities: policing and public safety, public schools, downtown revitalization, and RFK Stadium renovations designed to lure the NFL’s Washington Commanders back to the city. Most of the District’s own tax revenues go to health and human services programs, and complement the already slimmed-down federal contributions to Medicaid and SNAP. Other potential targets include rental subsides (which has potential to increase homelessness, an issue that has sparked the president’s interest) and pre-kindergarten programs.
Debilitating public and charter school layoffs and program cuts would damage learning for the rest of the school year, which ends in mid-June. As summer approaches, potential cuts to libraries, recreation centers, and swimming pools would be damaging for a city with kids wanting places to go and things to do. Any increase in the numbers of young people disconnected from sports, arts, and other city-funded activities who go home to parents facing hard times or suddenly thrust into the job market does not bode well for the city’s social bonds.
Ironically, if beautification is a goal, precipitating a District of Columbia budget free fall would be ugly. Trying to cope with maintaining the National Mall would be a gigantic chore. Residents who have taken up rat patrols with their dogs in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress live, would be happy to share observations about how trash and poor upkeep fuel increases in rodents and other vermin. A deserted downtown not far from the museums and the monuments—and the bad press that would follow—would knock Washington down a few levels in world-class city rankings.
Infrastructure projects like a new Commanders stadium would cost more, if they could be done at all, and the city already has marginal leverage on others. To preserve the tenuous peace with the president, the mayor agreed to the erasure of Black Lives Matter Plaza, a pedestrian zone created after the George Floyd protests.
The House is back in session next week, but it is unclear when lawmakers plan to take up the Senate’s funding fix. Delays could indicate that there are more Orwellian concessions that Republicans might demand before they’ll agree to pass a bill that “restores” funding that has already been approved. The mayor plans to release the District’s fiscal 2026 budget on April 2, the same day that another iteration of the Trump tariff regime goes into effect, which ultimately may divert media and public attention from the latest political threats to the nation’s capital city.
