President Trump is tightening his grip on Washington, D.C., with an executive order demanding inquiries into whether city authorities are enforcing safety requirements for housing and transportation — and threatening consequences if lapses are found.
The order instructs the heads of the federal Transportation and Housing and Urban Development Departments to investigate whether the city is maintaining safe conditions in housing and transit facilities that receive federal support.
The two agencies are the latest sections of the federal government Mr. Trump has enlisted in his crackdown on Washington, which began two weeks ago with his declaration of a public safety emergency, allowing federal oversight of the city’s police force. He also deployed the National Guard to help patrol the city, a role that he expanded in the executive order on Monday.
The order directs the transportation secretary to look for conditions in the city’s federally funded transit services that “endanger transit workers,” and “take appropriate remedial action that is within the Department of Transportation’s authority” to fix them. In Washington, federal funding supports buses and subways as well as pedestrian and bicycle trails. Some transit hubs have been the site of assaults, theft, gun crime and occasionally homicide, in addition to fare evasion.
The order instructs the housing secretary to examine whether the city’s housing authority and local landlords are complying with “crime-prevention and safety requirements” of federal housing agreements, and to report infractions to federal and city authorities, including the attorney general, “as appropriate.”
H.U.D. agreements, the order states, “require housing providers to maintain safe, decent, and sanitary conditions,” and “restrict tenants who engage in criminal activity that threatens health, safety and the right to peaceful enjoyment for other tenants,” including drug distribution, criminal activity and domestic violence.
Any landlord subject to the city’s fair housing laws — a category that includes larger apartment buildings — enters into an agreement with the department when they accept a tenant with a housing voucher. And the city doesn’t let landlords discriminate against prospective tenants based on their source of income, which can include vouchers.
The order subjects a potentially wide swath of public and private housing providers to federal scrutiny. It also sets up tensions with the city’s tenant laws, which are considered strong and which do not permit evictions without a court order.
A spokesman for the office of Muriel Bowser, Washington’s mayor, declined to comment. Representatives of the District of Columbia Housing Authority did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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