Republican lawmakers are trying to gut the District of Columbia’s ability to enforce its traffic laws, taking aim at a relatively new no-right-on-red restriction and speed cameras.
They stashed provisions that would prohibit the city from funding enforcement of those traffic regulations into an appropriations bill Congress must pass before October, their latest effort to police traffic in the District. While most of them represent sprawling communities hundreds of miles away from the District of Columbia, they’re fully able to tinker with traffic policies in the nation’s capital, given their Constitutional jurisdiction over the city.
“I think no right on red is kind of dumb, don’t you?” said Rep. Jake Ellzey of Texas, a member of the House Appropriations Committee. He pointed to other places that don’t tend to have such restrictions. “I drive myself, and the no right on red and the traffic lights just drive me berserk.”
“But I also understand they feel like there’s a bunch of crazy drivers in this town,” Ellzey said, before admitting he was far less passionate about banning no-right-on-red policies in the District than he was about banning automated speed camera enforcement, which he said was a “clear violation” of constitutional rights.
A House Appropriations Committee aide told NOTUS in a written statement that “these provisions are about protecting people from overzealous efforts that treat traffic enforcement as a cash machine, not a public safety tool.”
In addition to the traffic provisions and the usual riders attached to D.C.’s funding bills, including ones that prohibit local funds from being spent on supporting abortion care or from setting up a recreational marijuana marketplace, Republicans attached a laundry list of other demands to the legislation.
One would allow anyone with a concealed carry permit from any state to have handguns in the city, including on public transit. Another would ban city officials from registering noncitizens to vote in local elections. And another seeks to bar the city from suing oil and gas companies that violate its consumer protection laws.
District of Columbia policies — with its crime policies decried by Republicans as too permissive and its traffic regulations as “overzealous” — have long gotten caught in congressional culture wars, dragging the city’s some-odd 700,000 residents into the crossfire. After House Republicans accidentally made about $1 billion of the city’s own locally generated funds inaccessible this year, conservatives held up a fix, wanting more conditions on the city’s spending.
Those efforts lost momentum throughout the reconciliation process, forcing the city to freeze hiring and even close some public bathrooms, all as it plans for economic troubles caused by the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce.
But Republicans wanting to restrict the city’s traffic enforcement have raised street safety concerns from District locals. While their delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, said she “will use every tool at my disposal to stop these riders from becoming law,” the nonvoting member of Congress doesn’t have many other options beyond trying to convince her colleagues.
Meanwhile, in D.C., the stakes of drastic changes to traffic regulations are high: Every square mile is packed with about 11,500 people living, working and shopping at places within walking distance. More than one-third of the city’s households don’t even have a car, which presents vastly different policy problems than many of the car-reliant districts those Republicans were elected to represent.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office declined to comment, but she has previously said policies banning right turns on red lights stop “entirely preventable” crashes and fatalities. The city moved to ban right turns at about 100 of its most dangerous intersections in 2019, and a study commissioned by the city’s transportation department showed those intersections saw a reduced number of crashes between pedestrians and vehicles. City officials expanded that initiative in 2022 by passing a ban at every intersection, which began this year, but it’s currently only enforced at half of the city’s intersections due to funding issues.
Pedestrians, cyclists and drivers have no shortage of anecdotes about close calls while navigating bustling cityscapes. And neighborhood leaders representing the District’s densest areas — and some of the most deadly in terms of traffic fatalities — say there’s been a clear improvement in safety because of the city’s traffic enforcement policies, and would prefer them to stay.
“Columbia Heights and Ward 1 are incredibly dense areas, with tons of people walking, biking and relying on public transit. No-turn-on-red policies just make sense in places like this, and I’m aware of similar efforts in cities like San Francisco and Seattle that actually resulted in improved safety,” wrote Jeremy Sherman, the chair of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, in an email to NOTUS. “We know our streets best, and we should be the ones deciding what’s safest for our own communities.”
The ACLU-D.C. lambasted the proposals, saying members of Congress should focus on issues that matter to their constituents and are of national importance instead.
“They were not elected to waste their time and taxpayer money on dictating and micromanaging the day-to-day affairs of the District. It is deeply inefficient for Congress to waste their time on whether people can turn right on red lights in D.C. or whether D.C. can spend money on local traffic enforcement,” Melissa Wasser, senior policy counsel with the organization, told NOTUS via email.
Wasser added that the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 — which some GOP lawmakers are trying to repeal again — was created in part because federal lawmakers didn’t have the bandwidth to manage every municipal operation and policy, including traffic enforcement. Before that legislation, members of Congress worked directly with federal commissioners to run the city.
“Congressional offices fielded calls about D.C.’s potholes, trash pickup, schools and crime, in addition to calls from constituents in their home states. By 1973, many members of Congress were quite eager to give up the responsibility,” Wasser said.
But the reemergence of these provisions signals that the Republican-controlled Congress in 2025 is just as eager to meddle in even the most nitty-gritty of city affairs once again.
Some Republican appropriators acknowledged that Congress does have constitutional jurisdiction over the city, but told NOTUS they didn’t see any reason for lawmakers to dictate how D.C. manages its traffic.
“The lowest, and closest to the issue oughta be dealing with it, so that’d be state and local,” Rep. John Rutherford of Florida told NOTUS. “Whatever the local D.C. folks wanna do is what I would support.”
And Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada said he was “unaware” of such traffic-related provisions, feeling that he didn’t have a stake in vehicular matters, despite his position on the appropriations subcommittee where these provisions appeared.
“As a guy who doesn’t have a car in D.C., that’s not top on my radar list, in all fairness,” Amodei said. “I’m a big believer in public transit here in D.C. … Metro, baby! Got my card.”
“It’s worth your life to park in this town,” Amodei added. “I’m a metro guy.”