Washington, D.C
US House to vote on ‘reckless’ $1bn budget cut to Washington DC
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.
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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.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
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4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
Washington, D.C
‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington
The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.
In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.
“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”
Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.
Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.
“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.
“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”
Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”
A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.
Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.
Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.
But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.
“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”
At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.
The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.
Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.
For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.
“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”
For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.
In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.
Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.
“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”
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