By Aidan Quigley and Andrew Menezes
CQ-Roll Call
(CQ-Roll Call) — President Donald Trump on Friday threw his support behind the funding fix needed to allow the District of Columbia’s government to avoid $1.1 billion in budget cuts squeezed in the remaining half of the fiscal year, all but ensuring House passage of legislation the Senate passed two weeks ago.
The full-year stopgap spending law, drafted by House Republicans, did not include the typical provision that would allow the D.C. government to tap into its fiscal 2025 budget for operating costs. This would force D.C. to go back to the previous year’s funding levels for the remainder of the fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30, which local officials say would require steep cuts in critical services like law enforcement and education.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Friday that the House should “IMMEDIATELY” take up the Senate bill, which passed shortly after that chamber cleared the stopgap measure. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City, and make it beautiful again,” he posted. “We will be TOUGH ON CRIME, like never before.”
The D.C. budget bill wouldn’t have any impact on the federal budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would simply allow local officials to spend up to the city’s approved budget for fiscal 2025. Some House Republicans, however, decided it would be better to treat the D.C. budget like federal agencies funded through the stopgap measure, which mostly have to operate on their fiscal 2024 appropriations.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., led the bill in that chamber. During floor debate, Collins said Trump had privately endorsed it as well as House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla.
“This bill would simply fix a mistake in the House CR,” Collins said on March 14. “There are no federal dollars involved. The issue here is just allowing the D.C. government to proceed to spend its own tax revenues.”
Cole this week confirmed that he would back the Senate-passed bill. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has not yet committed to taking up the measure. Aides weren’t immediately available for comment, but Trump’s endorsement could be a game-changer.
Both chambers are in session for two more weeks before a two-week Easter recess.
Trump’s endorsement comes after he issued an executive order Thursday night aimed at making the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful.”
The order established a “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” whose members would include representatives of several Cabinet-level departments. The task force would be responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, including “redirecting” resources to “apprehend and deport illegal aliens” in the D.C. area and monitoring the District’s “sanctuary-city status.”
Other assignments for the task force include helping to speed up and lowering the cost of processing concealed carry license requests in D.C. and “deploying a more robust Federal law enforcement presence” in the District.
The order also calls on the task force to develop and implement a program to “beautify and make safe and prosperous” the capital city. Under the directive, elements of the program would include coordinating with local officials to remove graffiti from public places and “the restoration of Federal public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been damaged or defaced, or inappropriately removed or changed, in recent years.”
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