Washington DC has found itself in the crosshairs of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in recent weeks, with efforts by both to exert more control over the overwhelmingly Democratic capital city.

The president on Thursday signed an executive order he said would make Washington DC “safe, beautiful, and prosperous” by stepping up crime fighting, arrests of undocumented immigrants and the processing of permits to carry concealed weapons. Trump separately directed JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, which has many museums in and around the city.

Weeks earlier, Republicans in Congress approved a $1bn cut to the city’s budget that the mayor, Muriel Bowser, warned would result in disruptive cuts to police, schools and health services. The Senate quickly scrambled to undo the reduction, an effort Trump has since endorsed, but it is unclear when the House of Representatives will act.

“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,” the president wrote on Friday.

The forays into the city’s politics come despite efforts by Bowser to improve her previously tense relationship with Trump, including by jackhammering the Black Lives Matter plaza installed near the White House. While the public-safety executive order had long been anticipated, the budget cut was a surprise that was enacted as part of a federal government spending bill passed hours before a shutdown would have occurred.

Tazra Mitchell, chief policy and strategy officer at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute thinktank, said a cut of that magnitude to the city’s budget would ripple beyond its borders and affect transit and healthcare systems shared with neighboring Maryland and Virginia.

“We’re taught as children, if we make a mistake, we own up to it, and we try to do better and right the wrong that we’ve caused. And what we saw is that the US House had that opportunity and chose not to right the wrong,” Mitchell said.

The legislation, written by House Republicans and making use of Congress’s ability to review Washington DC’s laws, omits language approving its budget for the 2025 fiscal year. That prevents the city from spending its own locally collected tax revenue and forces a reversion to 2024’s spending levels, with likely devastating effects on its municipal services.

“These are local dollars. It doesn’t save the federal government any money. We’re halfway through our fiscal year, and cutting now would be reckless,” Bowser said at a press conference after the spending bill was approved.

While she did not say when the cut would take effect, the mayor warned that “if we had to make a billion-dollar cut right now … we have to go where the money is in our budget to cut that fast. And our top areas of spending are schools, public safety and the human services.”

It is unclear how the language approving Washington DC’s budget was removed from the federal spending bill, but just after it passed the Senate, the Republican Susan Collins described the omission as “a mistake”, and the chamber unanimously passed her legislation to fix it.

In the House, Republican leaders have not said when they will put it up for a vote, and a spokesperson for the speaker, Mike Johnson, did not respond to a request for comment. After Trump weighed in, Punchbowl News reported that the House would likely vote on the measure in early April.

Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House appropriations committee, tried to get language approving the city’s budget added back in when her chamber passed the spending bill, but Republicans refused. “Speaker Johnson continues to drag his feet on putting the DC funding fix on the floor of the House of Representatives. This should have never happened,” DeLauro said. “President Trump is right to call on the House to take up the bill that the Senate has already unanimously passed.”

Some allies of the president have encouraged passage of the fix, including the National Fraternal Order of Police, which warned of a “quite severe” public-safety impact if the funding is not restored. The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute called the funding cut “deeply unfortunate”, while Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim US attorney for the district, told a neighborhood group this week that he had asked Johnson to bring the fix to the floor.

Some aligned with Trump regard the fix as leverage that should be used over the city. Before Trump weighed in, Andy Harris, chair of the far-right House Freedom caucus, told the Hill the measure’s passage should be delayed because his group needs “a little while to come up with a list of what requirements we should put on DC”, and criticized the city for spending “dollars in ways that in the past we thought were pretty foolish”.

Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, outlined in the Daily Signal a series of policies Congress could impose on Washington DC in the fix, including banning non-citizens from voting in local elections, preventing the city from spending money on undocumented immigrants and giving federal prosecutors the ability to prosecute juvenile offenders as adults.

If House leaders agree, it would be the latest instance of congresses, Democratic and Republican alike, interfering in the affairs of a city that many residents believe should be a state.

“It’s not even a budget cut. It’s really like a power grab over DC’s budget,” said Alex Dodds, co-founder of Free DC, a group that advocates for the city’s autonomy. “There’s just no way that people in Congress or this president know what we need better than we do.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Just a few days into spring and the D.C. region has its first day in the 80s since November 7th, 2024. 

FOX 5’s Gwen Tolbart says there will be more clouds than sun today, but the warmth will make up for it! There will be a few peeks of sunshine, with exceptionally warm conditions today with temps in the low to mid 80s. 

Winds will pick up later and it will become quite breezy. South/SW 5-10mph, gusting up to 25+mph. Tonight, still mostly cloudy, lows in the 60s a mild night. 

Another warm day on Sunday with highs in the 70s to about 80. We will still see lots of clouds, and a few afternoon showers and perhaps a thunderstorm during the second half of the day, but it does not look like a washout.

▶ Watch Video: How cherry blossoms arrived to the U.S.

Washington, D.C.’s iconic cherry blossoms reached the 2025 peak bloom on Friday, March 28, the National Park Service said, about a week after the city kicked off its annual Cherry Blossom Festival.

Thousands of trees with white and pink flowers circle the Tidal Basin and parks near some of the capital’s famous monuments and memorials.

Here’s what to know about where to see the cherry trees in bloom.

Tidal Basin cherry blossoms in peak bloom in Washington, D.C.

Peak bloom occurs when 70% of the blossoms of the Yoshino cherry trees, the most common type along the Tidal Basin, are open. The National Park Service, which tracks the blooming of the trees each year, announced peak bloom on March 28.

This year’s peak came slightly earlier than the average date, April 3, but more than 10 days later than 2024’s peak on March 17.
The timing of peak bloom varies each year, largely due to temperatures, with warmer temperatures leading to earlier peak blooms.

Since 1921, when the National Park Service began recording the dates, peak blooms have shifted earlier by about eight days, the Environmental Protection Agency says.

Where to see the D.C. cherry blossoms

The most famous place to see the cherry blossoms in the nation’s capital is around the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. Many cherry trees are also along a section of the Potomac River and Washington Channel in East Potomac Park.

This year, construction that began in August 2024 to replace seawalls along the Potomac River and part of the Tidal Basin could affect the viewing of some of the cherry trees. The work is expected to last through 2026.

However, there are many other cherry trees throughout Washington, D.C. Casey Trees, a nonprofit that plants and cares for trees in the city, provides a map of where to see the blossoms across Washington. The map does not include trees on private property, the organization said.

How long will the cherry blossoms last in D.C.?

The Yoshino cherry trees usually bloom for several days, the National Park Service said, but weather conditions will affect the length of time.

“Cool, calm weather can extend the length of the bloom, and a rainy, windy day can bring an abrupt end to the ephemeral blossoms,” the agency said on its website. “A late frost can prevent the trees from blooming at all.”

Why does D.C. have cherry blossoms?

Japan gifted more than 3,000 cherry trees to the United States in 1912 as a symbol of friendship.

That year, first lady Helen Herron Taft and the wife of the Japanese ambassador, Viscountess Chinda Iwa, planted two of the Yoshino cherry trees along the Tidal Basin, the National Park Service notes in a history of the trees. In the next few years, the trees continued to be planted around the basin and other areas.

But the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in the U.S. capital was raised as early as 1885 by a woman named Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, a writer and diplomat, according to the National Park Service.

Despite her first request to the U.S. Army Superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds not going anywhere, she continued to ask and eventually wrote to Herron Taft, who helped bring the idea to life, the agency says.