Headline Roundup • March 11th, 2025
GOP's Federal Spending Bill Proposes Major Cut to D.C.'s Budget, BLM Plaza Demolished
Summary from the AllSides News Team
House Republicans have proposed a $1 billion cut to Washington, D.C.'s budget and threatened more cuts if Black Lives Matter Plaza was not renamed.
The Details: The federal spending bill suggests treating D.C. like a federal agency, leading to a $1 billion reduction in local services and job cuts for teachers, firefighters, and police officers. It would roll back 16% of the city's funding. It could also hurt the city's credit rating, making borrowing more expensive for infrastructure projects. The budget cut proposition is a break from a 20-year precedent that allowed D.C. to maintain its budget levels even when Congress struggled to pass its own budget.
Key Quotes: Over the weekend, House GOP leadership aides said that the language was omitted to treat D.C. as a federal agency and to treat all federal agencies “equally” by keeping all at 2024 spending levels. D.C. officials asked Congress not to pass the measure in a last-ditch protest. “In the most recent continuing resolution language, it ignores our already congressionally approved fiscal 2025 budget,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said. “Instead, it would peg us at FY24 levels — the levels that federal agencies are [at] because they do not have an approved FY 25 budget.” She added, “We are not a federal agency. We are a city, county, state all at once.” White House staff and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office have reportedly been in contact with Mayor Bowser regarding the language of the continuing resolution.
BLM Plaza: The Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House, has been demolished, following a proposal by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) to cut transportation funding to the city if the plaza was not renamed.
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Featured Coverage of this Story
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and almost every D.C. lawmaker stood on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Monday and implored House Republicans to reverse course on the $1.1 billion in cuts to D.C. services they said the GOP’s spending bill would cause to its $21 billion local budget if the measure passed — a rare show of solidarity across all corners of District government that underscored the depth of city officials’ fears.
The GOP’s stopgap funding bill, called a continuing resolution, would treat D.C. as a federal agency and...
The bill House Republicans introduced Saturday to keep the government open would cut Washington, D.C.’s 2025 budget by $1 billion.
The continuing resolution would treat Washington’s budget like a government agency’s, rolling back discretionary funding. It would also break with 20 years of precedent. Since 2004, Congress has allowed Washington to maintain its budget levels without disruption if a stopgap funding bill needed to be passed.
Greg Nash
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) on Monday sounded alarm over what she described as a “$1.1 billion problem” in a plan rolled out by House Republicans to keep the government funded beyond a Friday shutdown deadline and into September. In remarks outside of Congress on Monday afternoon, Bowser called on lawmakers to change the language in the stopgap plan, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), to prevent the District from being forced to revert to the previous fiscal year’s funding levels. Bowser said the plan would “immediately have...
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