D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered a hiring freeze and directed her team to plan for employee furloughs and facility closures as the city grapples with a congressionally mandated $1 billion budget cut in the middle of its fiscal year.
The order from Ms. Bowser also stops pay raises, promotions, bonuses and overtime pay — the last of which was a key incentive for the short-staffed Metropolitan Police Department to get officers to take on extra shifts.
The Democratic mayor said she’s taking the “extraordinary measures” after a $1.1 billion budget cut was included in federal stopgap legislation, authored by the Republican-controlled House, passed last month.
The Senate approved a proposal to reverse D.C.’s budget shortfall — a move in the upper chamber that had President Trump’s backing — but the bill to undo the budget cut has not been taken up by the House.
With the House in recess until April 28, Ms. Bowser is moving forward with plans to trim the city’s budget more than halfway through the fiscal year.
“These are unprecedented actions, given that the District itself adopted and is able to fully implement a balanced budget, but they are necessary due to the congressional cut to the District’s budget and its inaction in timely fixing its legislative error,” Ms. Bowser wrote in the Tuesday order.
The mayor tasked City Administrator Kevin Donahue to produce a plan for furloughs and facility closures by April 25. The freeze on overtime pay will take effect April 27, while the hiring freeze is immediate.
Certain facilities exempt from potential closures, according to the order, include all D.C. Public Schools buildings, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast, all homeless shelters, and facilities that focus on behavioral health and psychiatric emergencies.
Spending on “nonpersonnel expenditures,” such as supplies, security, machinery and some government subsidies and grants, was also frozen by the order.
The budget conundrum arose after congressional lawmakers removed a decades-old provision from last month’s temporary spending bill, called a continuing resolution, that lets D.C. fund city operations even when Democrats and Republicans are at odds over federal spending.
Without the provision, the stopgap law holds the city to the same standards as federal agencies, which must revert their budgets to 2024 levels.
Ms. Bowser and nearly every other lawmaker in D.C. argued that the enforced budget cut affects only local tax dollars raised by the city and won’t help lower the federal deficit.
Before the budget cut was signed into law, the mayor warned that Metropolitan Police, D.C. Fire and EMS, and D.C. public schools could all face spending reductions. Now, the D.C. Police Union wants MPD to advocate for carve-outs for the department facing a 50-year low in staffing.
“We are encouraging Chief [Pamela] Smith to move to secure exemptions for overtime and hiring to mitigate these impacts,” union Chairman Gregg Pemberton said in a statement. “We urge the city administrator to grant waivers to protect public safety, as permitted under the order. The union stands ready to collaborate with the chief, the mayor’s office and other stakeholders to advocate for solutions that prioritize the well-being of our communities.”
Focus on the midyear cuts delayed Ms. Bowser’s plans to share her budget proposal for fiscal 2026, which was supposed to be introduced on April 2.
D.C. officials have said the city faces a roughly $1 billion drop in revenue over the next three years due to the Trump administration’s downsizing of the federal government.
