Monday, May 11, 2026
For two decades, the District of Columbia’s budget has done one thing reliably: grow. That streak just ended.
Mayor Muriel Bowser has dropped a $21-billion proposal on the Council’s desk — smaller than last year’s, and by most reckonings the first shrinking budget the city has seen in roughly 20 years.
Forget the press-release framing; that’s the headline. Washington, the city that always had a little more to spend next year than it did this one, doesn’t anymore.
What happens next is the Council’s most consequential job, full stop. Budgets aren’t paperwork. They’re priorities with dollar signs attached — and this year’s numbers don’t lie.
Here’s where the money goes: roughly $7 billion to human services. Another $4 billion to public schools. About $2 billion servicing debt. Nearly $1.9 billion on public safety.
Add it up and those four categories swallow about 76 percent of every dollar the District spends. Everything else — buses, parks, permit offices, inspectors, the entire scaffolding of city government — fights over what’s left.
That’s not a budget with a lot of give. It’s a budget with four pillars and a hallway.
Which brings us to the trap the Council is walking into. If revenues are down and the pie is shrinking, the math gets brutal fast: real cuts can only come from the Big Four. And the Big Four are exactly what no elected official wants to touch.
Human services protect the city’s most vulnerable. Schools educate its children. Public safety is, well, public safety. Debt service isn’t optional. So which sacred cow gets the knife?
Bowser’s proposal makes its choices. With trims here, adjustments there, it’s an honest-enough attempt to pull spending into line with what the District can actually afford. Now the Council gets to decide whether to swallow the medicine — or reach for the sugar.
History suggests that sugar wins. Councils in this city, and in plenty of others, have a long, well-worn habit of softening cuts with one-time revenues, accounting maneuvers and creative bookkeeping that makes today’s numbers work and tomorrow’s problems worse.
It’s a magic trick. The rabbit always comes back.?
This is the moment to skip the magic.
If D.C. is genuinely entering a slower-growth era, the responsible move is to act like it — even when “responsible” means saying no in places where saying no is politically radioactive.
And about that politics: this is an election year. Of course it is. Hard votes are hard enough in any year; in an election year, with voters paying attention and opponents taking notes, the gravitational pull toward delay, defer and don’t-rock-the-boat is enormous.
Governing well means resisting that pull anyway.
Over the next several weeks, the Council will hold hearings, comb through agency budgets and haggle over amendments. A final vote is scheduled for June 19. Expect noise. Expect lobbying. Expect every line item to have a champion and every cut to have a casualty.
The test isn’t whether the Council passes a budget — it has to. The test is whether what it passes reflects fiscal reality or just political comfort.
Because a balanced budget isn’t a legal box to check. It’s a promise: that the services residents count on this year will still be there next year, and the year after and the one after that. Gimmicks break that promise quietly. Discipline keeps it.
The choices made in this cycle will set the city’s trajectory for years. The only real question is whether the people making them are willing to choose like it.
Attorney Jack Evans represented Ward 2 on the District Council from 1991 to 2020.