D.C. mayor eyes layoffs as bill to reverse $1B budget cut idles in Congress

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Monday the city has to consider job cuts and other potential remedies, because proposals to reverse a $1 billion midyear budget cut have not advanced through Congress.

Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, did not specify what cuts or service reductions will be made to the city’s $21 billion budget so it can comply with a stopgap federal spending bill that took effect last month.

But the mayor said everything is a possibility, including letting city workers go.

“Given the amount of time we have left in our fiscal year — six months — I can’t say, I can’t take off the table job impacts,” Ms. Bowser said Monday at a media event.

D.C. leaders have warned the budget cuts, which were tucked into the temporary spending bill called a continuing resolution, could cause the city to lay off personnel at schools, the fire department and the police force.

Ms. Bowser has lobbied to restore the funding ever since the cuts were first announced in early March.

She won over Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, who helped unanimously pass a resolution to spare the District from the budget cut that is also being applied to federal agencies.

President Trump and Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, the District’s top prosecutor, have also come out in favor of reversing the budget cuts.

“The House should take up the D.C. budget ’fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done immediately,” Mr. Trump wrote last month about the $1 billion cut. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City, and make it beautiful again.”

But House Republicans, who first added the budget cut into their original CR bill, have yet to act on the Senate’s resolution.

Ms. Bowser and other officials have said the money targeted in the budget cut are all locally generated tax dollars, and would not affect the federal government’s bottom line.

D.C. officials said cuts could include $300 million from the city’s public and charter schools, $216 million from Metro transit, $75 million from the Metropolitan Police Department, $38 million from D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services and $28 million from the city’s Department of Human Services.

Those agencies are targets for cuts because much of the city’s budget is tied up in contracts, leases and Medicaid. Accessing the funds for those commitments would take longer before the fiscal year ends.

Local leaders said they could soften some of the blow by increasing spending levels roughly 6% this year, citing a federal law that gives the District such powers. The cuts would amount to around $400 million in that case.

Still, anxiety about the cuts looms over the District’s political leaders.

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson last week described the situation as “a vise that’s closing … At some point, the dollars are not going to be there and we will have to act.”

The House returns from recess on April 28.