President Donald Trump is urging the House of Representatives to take up a Senate-passed measure that would allow the District of Columbia to spend revenue held up by the last funding bill.
But in the House, Republican leadership hasn’t committed to any sort of a timeline, and House Freedom Caucus members — including one who sits on the committee that would need to approve the legislation if leadership wants it passed by a simple majority on the House floor — say they’re unwilling to help D.C. out of its funding bind unless they can add conditions on how the city can spend its local funds.
“I don’t think our leadership has had a chance to decide when and how they’re going to put it on the floor,” Appropriations Chair Tom Cole told reporters on Thursday, adding that while he supported it, he hadn’t spoken with Speaker Mike Johnson about the bill yet.
One aide confirmed that the conversations are ongoing without a resolution in sight.
“Appropriators are in close contact with D.C. city officials as leadership determines a path forward,” a House GOP aide told NOTUS in an emailed statement.
The last government funding bill omitted language typically included in continuing resolutions about how the District of Columbia could spend money, which Mayor Muriel Bowser has said would effectively result in a $1 billion immediate cut to city operations.
When city officials raised the issue before the government funding bill’s consideration on the Senate side, Sen. Susan Collins, head appropriator, introduced a separate bill that would allow the city to spend according to its budget for the current fiscal year. Both passed the Senate on March 14.
Collins acknowledged that some House Republicans are concerned that the usual conditions Congress attaches to the city’s spending aren’t explicitly laid out in her bill, but she told NOTUS that those amendments would still apply and that she’s confirmed as much with the Congressional Research Service.
“We’ve shared that information with the House, and the D.C. government also has the legal opinion that the riders would still apply,” Collins said.
The Congressional Budget Office said the funding-fix bill would cost the federal government a grand total of $0 because “the funds that would be spent are collected by the District of Columbia.”
But the fact that it wouldn’t cost the federal government anything to enact the bill is beside the point for some objectors in the House who want to see even more conditions put on the city — especially by lawmakers hungry to chip away at some of Washington’s home rule authority.
“I assure you, they’re still relying upon the federal government a lot, so I’m not too worried about that,” Rep. Chip Roy, a House Freedom Caucus member who sits on the Rules Committee, told NOTUS. “I’m not itching to get more dollars to the District of Columbia until they kind of get with the program on a lot of different issues that I have concerns about.”
Roy pointed to the city’s abortion laws as an example. But other House Freedom Caucus members had other issues they were eager to hold up money over, from public safety to the city’s interest in studying reparations.
“The Constitution gave Congress the authority over the District of Columbia, and when they do crazy things, talk about doing crazy things, with spending the taxes paid by the District, we should have a say,” Rep. Andy Harris, the House Freedom Caucus chair, told NOTUS. “The bottom line is that I don’t think that’s what the majority of Americans want.”
Harris said the matter of putting additional conditions on the District of Columbia’s spending was “certainly” a concern among the House Freedom Caucus and that it didn’t matter to him that the money Congress is holding up comes from local taxes and not the federal government. He pointed to Congress’ constitutional authority over the District and said he was “embarrassed that this is the capital of the United States by the way the city government runs it.”
It’s unclear how much sway conservatives like Roy, Harris and Rep. Eric Burlison — who called the funding matter a “parochial issue” but still said he would hold back funding if the city didn’t commit to spending more on law enforcement — will ultimately have, especially now that Trump has reinforced his support of it.
“The House should take up the D.C. funding ‘fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done IMMEDIATELY. We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City, and make it beautiful again,” Trump posted Friday morning.
Some Republican lawmakers in the House told NOTUS on Thursday they hadn’t been following the issue at all — but Trump’s post might help put the matter on their radar.
And one Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa, who previously chaired the committee overseeing the District, told NOTUS he also hadn’t been following the funding issue closely but would offer his experience in getting it resolved.
“It’s no longer my committee of jurisdiction, but I will look at it as a friend of D.C. I’ll look at the Senate bill, and I’ll talk to a couple of the members,” Issa said on Thursday. “Let me take it to leadership after I read the bill.”
And House Democrats certainly wouldn’t stand in the way of the fix — if the bill ever makes it to the floor, that is.
“If Republicans are concerned about public safety in the nation’s capital, they should not have released a CR that cut D.C.'s funding, including for public safety purposes, halfway through the fiscal year,” Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting delegate for D.C., said in a statement to NOTUS. “They should concentrate on their own districts, not spend time rightly belonging to their own constituents interfering with the limited home rule D.C. currently possesses.”
While Trump publicly urged the House to pass the bill, he also made it clear the city’s autonomy will remain at his administration’s mercy.
“We will be TOUGH ON CRIME, like never before. I will work with the Mayor on this and, if it does not happen, will have no choice but to do it myself,” Trump wrote.
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.