The federal government is everywhere in the District of Columbia — it owns golf courses, public parks, waterfronts, sidewalks, road medians and those little plots of land inside the city’s famous traffic circles. Its hand is in the city’s finances, its courtrooms and its schools. It watches over every law the city passes and every local dollar it spends.
This omnipresence — even before the president took over the city’s police department and deployed the D.C. National Guard this week — has long made many basic aspects of life in Washington harder for local officials to manage.
And now President Trump and his allies in Congress are hammering the District for not managing it all better. Mr. Trump described the capital as a wasteland and vowed a crackdown on crime.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C.,” the president said on Monday, announcing plans to rescue the city from bloodthirsty criminals, roving youth, violent gangs and homeless people. “We’re going to take our capital back.”
But in fact, the capital has in many ways long been controlled — in mundane details and with sweeping consequences, much of it touching criminal justice and quality of life — by the federal government.
Yes, there is tension between the president’s portrayal of a crime-ridden capital and crime statistics that show that the city, while still struggling with violence, is growing safer. But the deeper conflict is this: between the conditions the president and congressional Republicans decry and the power the District has, on its own, to address them under the constraints of limited home rule.
“You’re berating me to fix certain things, and you want me to do it with one hand tied behind my back,” said Christina Henderson, a District of Columbia Council member. “And then when I’m unsuccessful, you seek to punish. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Just months ago, Republicans in Congress passed a bill funding the federal government that blocked the District from spending nearly a billion dollars of its own taxpayer money toward a city budget that Congress itself had already approved. The move set off a scramble to cover police salaries, school programs and public works — all investments in bettering the city.
Amid the shortfall, the city had to shut down popular, high-tech public toilets — a program explicitly aimed at improving public order, quality of life and cleanliness.
Though Republicans in the Senate passed a funding fix in March, the House has yet to consider the legislation months later (the city has managed to renew the toilet contract by shuffling money).
The limits to the city’s power — or, rather, the federal government’s power over it — extend well beyond this year’s budget crisis. The District can’t invest in many of the city’s neglected public spaces because they’re owned and controlled by the National Park Service. It can’t fill judicial vacancies on D.C. courts; that’s Congress’s job. It can’t set priorities for which kinds of crimes to prosecute; that’s the role of the U.S. attorney, who is nominated by the president.
The District is further constrained in the revenue it can raise to fund services, both because of the vast federal footprint in town, which yields no property taxes, and because the Home Rule Act bars the District from taxing nonresident commuters who work in the city (as many states do).
Congressional Republicans, through riders on annual appropriations bills, want to add many more conditions to how the city governs itself this year. One would bar the District from operating automated traffic cameras that aim to improve road safety and that generate revenue. Another would block the city from using its own funds to enforce vehicle emission standards. Another would prevent the city from carrying out any law that bans drivers from making right turns at red lights.
“D.C.’s limited home rule shapes almost every aspect of life here,” said Alex Dodds, a co-founder of Free D.C., an advocacy group that defends the city’s self-government.
Some Republicans are angling for the rest of what the city does control. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has introduced a bill to revoke home rule entirely, which would leave the city with no elected government. “They have not handled it well — they have allowed lawlessness to prevail,” he said this week.
But the federal government currently controls much of the city’s criminal justice system, including its prosecutor, its courts and its parole and pretrial release systems. The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia handles both federal crimes, like any other U.S. attorney would, and local crimes committed in D.C.
“Gee, the system isn’t working — well one of the reasons it doesn’t work is the U.S. attorney’s office has two clients,” said Meryl Chertoff, a professor at the Georgetown Law Center.
That can create limited resources for competing priorities, one of which inevitably outranks the other. The same U.S. attorney’s office that handled prosecutions stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol also handles armed robberies in D.C. neighborhoods far from the city’s monuments. And judges in D.C. courts must be confirmed by Congress just as federal judges are, a dynamic that has contributed to judicial vacancies and long waits for cases to come to trial. One result, Ms. Henderson said, is that people arrested of crimes don’t believe they’ll face swift consequences.
As the federal government has divided responsibilities and power between itself and the District, it has in many of these ways retained for itself jobs it doesn’t prioritize.
“Of course it’s not fair — as much of this isn’t fair to the District — because then you get short shrift when it comes to judges,” said David Pitts, the vice president for justice and safety at the Urban Institute, which is based in Washington.
The division of responsibilities today largely dates to the Home Rule Act passed by Congress in 1973, which enabled District residents to elect a local mayor and Council (while also spelling out what that mayor and Council could not do). But the convoluted structure of government in the city ultimately dates back much farther.
“This is one of those instances where you can really see where the founders just flat-out dropped the ball,” said George Derek Musgrove, a historian at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a co-author of a definitive history of the city.
The short story: Members of Congress meeting in Philadelphia in 1783 were mobbed by hundreds of soldiers demanding pay from the Revolutionary War. That fed the founders’ fear that they needed to establish a federal district the new government would control, where legislators would never need to ask a governor or local official to defend them (this history hovers over the Jan. 6 attack, when it was ultimately the District’s Metropolitan Police Department that helped quell the violence at the Capitol).
There are signs the founders realized the dilemma they created. Alexander Hamilton later proposed a constitutional amendment that would have given District residents representation in Congress once the new federal district grew large enough. But it wasn’t adopted. James Madison figured in one of the Federalist Papers that the states that gave up land for the federal district would make sure the residents there retained their rights. That didn’t happen either.
“Year after year, Congress kicks the can down the road, they don’t resolve the issue,” Professor Musgrove said. “Once that happens, people in Congress realize that there’s a benefit to them of overseeing the District.”
With federal control, the District can be a laboratory for policy experiments, or a stage for national political debates — roles it is serving today for Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans.
But the side effects of that strategy manifest as absurdities in the everyday lives of D.C. residents. The fountains in Meridian Hill Park and Freedom Plaza near the White House have long been broken, and the city can do nothing to fix them. The city legalized recreational marijuana in 2015, but a congressional rider has blocked the city from creating any system to regulate the sales, leading to a boom in gray-market storefronts.
The Council has had to make emergency provisions authorizing the mayor to issue marriage licenses, because otherwise District residents risked not being able to marry in D.C. Superior Court during a government shutdown.
Three blocks from the White House, the District recently spent $21 million to fix up a park it does not own because the federal agency charged with managing Yosemite and Yellowstone doesn’t also function well as a municipal parks and rec department.
To do that — to spend its own money on the kind of beautification project the president might appreciate in an area that attracted the homeless — the District had to ask Congress for permission, too.
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Times from Washington. She’s particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected.
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