President Donald Trump wants Congress to repair a significant cut to the District of Columbia’s budget and is happy to leave the procedural details to Speaker Mike Johnson, according to two White House officials.
But the president is prepared to work the phones — or, if needed, fire off a social media post — to correct legislative language that could have major repercussions for the capital city if left unaddressed.
Last Friday, the Senate passed a Trump-endorsed bill that would restore as much as $1.1 billion in local funding, according to District officials, that was — inadvertently, by some accounts — slashed by the government spending measure signed into law the next day.
The president has confidence the speaker will bring the bipartisan measure up for a vote, said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss Trump’s thinking.
How the bill gets through the House, however, is “sausage-making in the background,” said the official. “I don’t think he’ll publicly call for Johnson to bring [the fix] to the floor — that’s going to be a behind-the-scenes thing. If [Trump] must, though, a pressure campaign from Truth Social is always a possibility.”
If need be, Trump also is open to making calls to individual House members to ensure their support for the budget fix: “The president has no problem using his phone to make sure members get on board with what he’s trying to do.”
A second White House official, also granted anonymity to share private conversations, described the District of Columbia cut in the funding bill as “an oversight” that would eventually be fixed. That official said the White House wasn’t pressuring House GOP leaders and was giving Johnson space to figure out the way forward.
But Trump could, at some point, grow impatient: part of his interest in getting the budget fix approved is about extending an olive branch to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, one of the White House officials said.
While Bowser has pushed back on the threat to the city’s budget, she has mostly spoken respectfully about Trump and has recently taken steps to comply with GOP priorities for the city — for instance, dismantling the “Black Lives Matter Plaza” her administration set up near the White House amid the 2020 racial justice protests.
She so far has been viewed by the White House as a “good actor” in the endeavor to get the budget fix enacted, according to the official.
Still, congressional Republicans note the city won’t run out of money in the meantime; they also argue the shortfall is closer to $500 million, not $1.1 billion. In any case, local elected officials and their allies say a failure to enact the repair bill would effectively force the District of Columbia to make dramatic mid-fiscal-year cuts to law enforcement, infrastructure improvement efforts and public education.
As House Republicans worked to advance a seven-month funding bill to avert a government shutdown last week, GOP leadership did not include routine language allowing the District to continue spending its local budget dollars. And while leaders made several changes to the bill text just before bringing it to the House floor for a vote, they didn’t address Washington’s funding omission.
It caught many senior lawmakers off guard.
“It came as a surprise to me and explains why the mayor has called me,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine said in an interview. “It certainly wasn’t something we did.”
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) at first told reporters he thought the omission was to rescind funding for “a lot of inaugural stuff,” saying “we’re not leaving inauguration funding going to D.C. in a bill when there’s not an inauguration.”
He later acknowledged that not all the slashed funding fell under that inauguration category, but he declined to address it, saying he’d have to “look at it in more detail” and that “it’s actually in the weeds.”
Many facets of the District of Columbia are subject to congressional oversight, but most of the city’s $21.2 billion budget is funded by local taxpayers. Roughly $5 billion comes from the federal government — the vast majority through formula-based federal programs, such as Medicaid, similar to what states receive.
Johnson now has to figure out when and how to bring the bill up for a floor vote amid opposition from hard-liners in his rebellious conference. GOP leaders feel like they have some time to figure out the way forward.
The speaker is not currently planning to advance the bill Monday through the Rules Committee, which would pave the way for a floor vote requiring a simple majority that could splinter Republicans on a procedural motion needed to bring the measure forward. Most likely, Johnson will need to pursue an expedited floor maneuver in the coming weeks that requires a two-thirds majority vote to secure passage.
Outside pressure — not just from Trump — could continue to build. City residents gathered outside the tiny House Rules Committee room for its initial meeting to set parameters for floor debate on the stopgap funding bill, raising alarms and objections to lawmakers about the consequences of the cuts.
