Speaker Mike Johnson and District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser spoke Monday on a call to discuss a path forward on legislation to restore the capital city’s full spending powers, according to one person granted anonymity to share details of the private conversation.
Still, there are no plans to bring the bill to the House floor in the coming days before the chamber leaves for a two-week recess, said three people with direct knowledge of the schedule.
That will keep city officials in further limbo as they soon need to make decisions about whether to wait for congressional action or move ahead with plans to account for a looming budget shortfall of as much as $1.1 billion — requiring dramatic mid-fiscal-year cuts to law enforcement, infrastructure improvement efforts and public education.
Johnson back in March drafted a stopgap funding measure to float federal operations through the end of September that omitted key language typically included in appropriations bills allowing the District of Columbia to continue to spend its own locally-raised tax dollars.
The Senate passed legislation to restore that provision after clearing the standalone government funding bill to avoid an imminent shutdown. At that time, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) noted the measure had support from her counterpart, House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), as well as the White House.
President Donald Trump has since posted on social media that he wants the House to take up the funding fix, saying the chamber should vote on it “IMMEDIATELY” to “clean up our once beautiful Capital City, and make it beautiful again.”
Still, Johnson hasn’t moved the bill. People aware of internal party dynamics describe it as a casualty of unrelated floor schedule delays and an overloaded legislative calendar, where the District of Columbia budget fix just isn’t being made a priority. GOP leaders were at one point aiming to bring the measure to the floor before the upcoming Easter recess.
But Johnson is also contending with conservative fiscal hawks who aren’t fond of the capital city and its liberal leadership, and see the bill as giving away more than $1 billion away in federal funding — though that is not an accurate understanding of what the measure would actually do.
GOP leaders are considering adding conservative policy provisions in the underlying bill that would encourage more Republicans to support it — though that strategy has not yet been decided. It's also far from clear whether Democrats would stand for further infringements on the city's Home Rule authority, which could matter in the narrowly-divided House and in the Senate.
A spokesperson for Bowser declined to comment.
