LWVUS Sends Letter to the House Supporting DC

LWVUS urged members of the House of Representatives to support the District of Columbia Local Funds Act.

March 25, 2025

Dear Representative: 

On behalf of the League of Women Voters of the United States (the League), we urge you to support the District of Columbia Local Funds Act to allow the District of Columbia (DC) to spend its locally raised revenue. This bill has already passed with unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and we hope that you will join in codifying it with the same overwhelming support in the House. Additionally, Mayor Bowser and the entire elected DC City Council support the bill.

As passed on March 14, the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act created an immediate $1 billion hole in DC’s local spending budget. It blocked DC from spending over $1 billion of locally raised tax dollars, without saving the federal government any money. This money belongs to DC and its taxpayers. Without it, the 700,000 DC residents — including many congressional staff and commuters — and the 26 million tourists who visit the nation’s capital will be heavily impacted by the loss to programs that seek to serve them. 

Current law would require immediate cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars to essential District services such as police and fire, corrections, transportation — including Metro, sanitation, education, health care, and other programs. These impacts include:

• Public safety cuts of:
  • $67 million to the Metropolitan Police Department
  • $42 million to DC Fire and EMS
• Education cuts of $350 million to public and charter schools
• Health cuts of $28 million to the Department of Human Services
• Water and sewer cuts of $51 million to DC Water 

DC residents already bear taxation without representation at the federal level, which is a serious disparity in our democracy. Blocking DC from spending $1 billion of its own locally raised tax dollars represents a serious government overreach into the District’s autonomy and decision-making. In contrast to this continuing resolution (CR), all CRs for the past twenty years have included language that authorizes DC to spend its locally passed — and balanced — current-year budget. Without the passage of the District of Columbia Local Funds Act, DC would have to revert to its FY24 budget, in which local spending is $1 billion less than in the current year. Time is of the essence in passing this bill, as DC loses out on $5.5 million every day that this law isn’t in place.

We hope that you will vote to pass this bill with bipartisan support, just as it was passed in the Senate. For questions, please feel free to reach out to our staff via me at [email protected] or Kristen Kern, Federal Policy and Advocacy Manager at [email protected]. 

Sincerely,

Jessica Jones Capparell 
Director, Government Affairs
League of Women Voters of the US