Kevin Corinth: Thanks very much for having me.

Greg Jaczko: Could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your connection to the District?

Kevin Corinth: Sure, I’d be happy to. I’ve been living in the District for 12 years. Two of my three kids were born in DC, and they all attend DC public and charter schools. My wife is a teacher at a charter school in DC. So we’ve been here a long time. I’ve actually lived in DC longer than any other place in my whole life. I definitely enjoy many parts of it: the urban atmosphere, being amid all the museums and the government institutions, but also the local culture. It’s a place we’ve really grown to call home, and I definitely want to see it succeed going forward.

Greg Jaczko: In that vein, maybe we can talk a little bit about what the housing voucher program is, how it works, and what role the payment standard plays. That seems to be an important part of the piece you wrote for Capital Commonsense.

Kevin Corinth: Sure. Technically, this is the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program. It’s a federally created and funded program that’s very important nationwide, providing assistance to families renting apartments in the private market. It differs from programs like public housing, where the government itself builds and manages the housing. These are vouchers that families can get, and they help pay the rent for apartments in the private market.

In DC, families can apply for housing vouchers. Well, they could apply, but the waitlist is actually closed, because there’s not enough funding for every family who needs it. This is not a program like food stamps or SNAP, where if you’re eligible, you get it. Here, if you’re eligible, you may be able to get assistance, but you have to go onto a waiting list, which can take many years to resolve, and many families never get assistance despite needing it.

Greg Jaczko: Kevin, could you talk a little bit about what percentage of people who are eligible for the program are able to get vouchers, compared to those who aren’t? Is it 20% or 30%?

Kevin Corinth: Nationally, the number is about one in four. So out of every four families that are eligible, one actually gets it, only a 25% receipt rate. I haven’t seen similar numbers for DC, although it’s worth noting that the waiting list is closed. So if you’re a low-income family in DC right now who’s eligible for the program, you can’t even get on the waiting list, because there’s not enough assistance for all the families who might need it.

Greg Jaczko: So that’s really, in a way, the crux of the issue: there’s this need, and yet the program isn’t able to satisfy the demand that’s out there.

Kevin Corinth: Yeah, that is a very frustrating problem with the program. It’s a frustrating problem throughout the country, but particularly in DC. There’s not going to be enough funding provided by the federal government. DC does supplement it with its own smaller portion, but there’s not enough funding to serve every family. So it’s important to use all the money we have to serve as many families as we possibly can, so that we’re helping low-income families in a fair and effective way.

Greg Jaczko: I kind of interrupted your explanation of the program. Maybe talk a little more about how it actually works and what this payment standard is.

Kevin Corinth: Sure, happy to. Once a family is eligible and applies, that day may eventually come when they get off the waiting list and are offered a voucher. Once they get the voucher, they can take it into the private rental market and find an apartment to rent. The amount they have to pay is equal to about 30% of their income. So if you have very little income, the family itself pays very little of the rent, and the government pays the remaining share.

This can be a very expensive subsidy, especially in a place like DC, where rents are relatively expensive. It could be a couple thousand dollars in subsidy every month for the government. Mechanically, the government pays the landlord its share directly, and the tenant pays their own share. And there’s no time limit and no work requirement. As long as the tenant is making their payments, isn’t damaging the unit, and doesn’t get evicted, they can stay potentially as long as they want.

The key issue I’ve been focusing on, which is the topic of my recent piece for Capital Commonsense, is the so-called payment standard. The payment standard is set by the DC Housing Authority. The federal government provides the funding and sets the general rules for the program, but the DC Housing Authority gets to determine the payment standard.

That’s essentially the maximum rent of an apartment a family can get. So say an apartment is listed for $3,000 a month. The family asks, okay, can I actually get this? Well, it depends on whether that amount is above or below the payment standard.

And it turns out the DC Housing Authority sets these payment standards extremely high. Hopefully listeners are familiar with the DC rental market. We’re not San Francisco, but apartments are expensive. Yet for a three-bedroom apartment, a family could rent a unit for up to $5,300, or $5,301, and still have the government cover all of the rent except for the tenant family’s contribution of 30% of their own income.

Greg Jaczko: And where does that number come from? Is there a formula the DC Housing Authority uses? How do they derive it?

Kevin Corinth: It’s 187% of the fair market rent. The fair market rent is set by the federal government, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s supposed to equal about the 40th percentile of rents in the area, adjusted for new renters, because apartments are sometimes more expensive for new renters than for existing ones. But it’s intended to be around the 40th percentile of market rents in the area, and the federal government suggests that’s a good baseline. Typically, cities are supposed to set the payment standard between 90% and 110% of the fair market rent.

In DC, the fair market rent is much lower than these payment standards. The DC Housing Authority has decided to set its payment standard much higher, at 187% of the fair market rent. I did some calculations in the Capital Commonsense post that would put it at about the 90th percentile of rents in the District. So in theory, a family could rent an apartment more expensive than 90% of apartments in the District.

Now, to be clear, it doesn’t have to be that high. That’s just the maximum. A family doesn’t have to find an apartment that costs $5,300. They may find one that’s $3,000 or $4,000, and those are all allowed. But it does enable those higher rents.

Greg Jaczko: And is the federal payment capped at the difference between the family’s 30% contribution and whatever the actual rent is? Or does it go as high as the actual voucher value? In other words, could the voucher overpay?

Kevin Corinth: The voucher can’t overpay. At most, for a three-bedroom apartment, the largest government contribution would be $5,301. Technically, a family can get an apartment that exceeds that amount, but every dollar above the payment standard, the family has to cover themselves. So they could do that, but they may not want to, because they’re bearing the expense of that decision.

Greg Jaczko: And you said that in DC, the payment standard is set at 187% of the fair market rent. How does that compare to other comparable cities? Is that what New York or San Francisco does? Where do they set that figure?

Kevin Corinth: DC is completely out of line with what other high-cost cities do. DC has a much less expensive housing market than San Francisco, and yet DC has a higher payment standard than San Francisco. You can also compare it to cities like Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. All these other high-cost cities, which actually have higher costs than DC, have much lower payment standards. They all set their payment standards around the fair market rent.

Some places, like Los Angeles and Boston, actually set different payment standards depending on the cost of a given neighborhood, basically by zip code. They’re saying some neighborhoods within Los Angeles or Boston are a little more expensive, or way more expensive, than others, so they vary the payment standard based on each zip code’s rents. That’s an authority housing authorities are allowed to use, and one the DC Housing Authority has not chosen to use.

Greg Jaczko: We’ll come back to that, because as I understand it, that’s part of your solution to improve the program: moving to more of a neighborhood-based standard for market rents. But before we get there, can you talk about the motivation? What’s the motivation behind having this higher voucher standard, and what are its advantages?

Kevin Corinth: I think there are a couple of motivations, and the motivations themselves are sound. The biggest one is that we want to make sure low-income families who get these vouchers have access to opportunity. We don’t want them stuck in the lowest-income zip codes with the lowest-quality housing. We want to promote socioeconomic integration. There’s research showing that low-income families, especially when their kids are young, benefit from living in higher-opportunity neighborhoods, which gives them more access to higher-quality schools in the District and puts them closer to public transportation. Those are real rationales. I think one of the rationales behind this high payment standard is to ensure that low-income families aren’t simply stuck in poorer areas but can access a wider array of places throughout the city.

And there is one safeguard here. It’s not that a family just says, “I’m going to rent this apartment,” and the DC Housing Authority says okay. They do perform a rent reasonableness check. Say I go and say, “I want this three-bedroom apartment. I have this voucher. The rent is $5,000.” There’s a process that checks whether that rent is reasonable for the area. If it’s a nice apartment in a nice area, maybe that really is the market rent, and it gets approved. And we need to think about whether that’s a good idea.

But we also need to keep in mind that the rent reasonableness check is not perfect. It’s done through a third-party website, it can take a couple of weeks, and it may not capture all the attributes of an apartment. It may end up leading to overpayments to landlords, who can capture extra subsidy above what they could get at the market rate.

So there are rationales behind a somewhat high payment standard, but I think there are better ways to achieve those goals than simply saying $5,300 for a three-bedroom apartment citywide. I don’t think that’s the right way.

Greg Jaczko: On the flip side, then, what’s the downside of having that high value?

Kevin Corinth: I think there are two, and I touched on this a bit already. One, it enables landlord abuse of the program, even with a rent reasonableness check. It’s possible for landlords to slip through the cracks, either because the check wasn’t done well, or because it was done well but there were things about the property that couldn’t be determined from this kind of third-party website review. So there’s a sense in which landlords could be capturing some of the subsidy that should be going to low-income families, taking it as extra profit they shouldn’t be getting.

And there have been documented cases of this. The Washington Post has done some of its own reporting, and others have looked into it. DC was actually audited by the federal government over issues related to this. So this is not just hypothetical. There has been landlord abuse of the program when payment standards are set this high. With a lower payment standard, you could still have some landlord abuse, but it would limit how much they could do, because there’s a smaller delta between the market rent and what they could actually capture.

Greg Jaczko: And who bears responsibility there? This is a blended program: the federal government provides the funding, but the District has implementation authority. So who’s responsible for limiting landlord abuse? Is it a federal obligation, or does it fall to the District and the DC Housing Authority?

Kevin Corinth: The DC Housing Authority is in charge of administering the program, so it’s responsible for mitigating and eliminating landlord abuse. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the federal government have oversight responsibility, and if they find the DC Housing Authority isn’t doing well, they can conduct audits and actually require it to make payments back to undo the damage. So it’s a shared responsibility.

But who’s ultimately hurt by it is low-income families in DC, because it’s a fixed pot of dollars the federal government provides to the District to administer the vouchers. Every dollar captured by a landlord is one less dollar for other low-income families who are on the waiting list, or who can’t even get onto the waiting list to get the assistance they need.

Greg Jaczko: Yeah, and it seems like that’s really the issue underlying a lot of your piece: striking a balance between giving families the opportunity to get the best apartment they can and, since it’s a fixed pot of money, making sure as many families as possible can access the program. And we know, as you said at the beginning, that it’s not serving every eligible family. Talk a little bit about how you’d approach that, and how we could allow more families into the program by changing the way the payment standard or payment structure works in the District.

Kevin Corinth: Sure. And I think it’s true that it’s not just about mitigating landlord abuse. There’s another issue here: we just want to serve more families. Even if there were no landlord abuse in the program, I personally don’t think it makes sense to say one family gets to rent a three-bedroom apartment in the District for $5,300 and another family gets nothing at all. I would much rather have families still able to access some of these better, higher-cost neighborhoods, but perhaps in more modest, decent-quality places that don’t have as many amenities. I want to make sure we spread the assistance around.

To achieve both goals, less landlord abuse and more families benefiting from a fixed pot of dollars, I would suggest dramatically reducing the payment standard but also making it neighborhood-dependent. This would follow the approach of places like Los Angeles and Boston, and there are other places that have adopted these small area fair market rents. The idea is to find the fair market rent, this 40th-percentile rent, or maybe the median rent, in each zip code within the District, and then tie the payment standard to that amount. That would be a major reduction in the payment standard compared to what it currently is.

In the highest-cost zip code, which currently covers Capitol Hill and some of the close-in Northwest neighborhoods, the fair market rent is currently about $4,200 for a three-bedroom apartment. That’s a reduction compared to the $5,301 we currently have, but I think it would be a much more realistic target. You can certainly rent apartments on Capitol Hill. I’ve rented an apartment on Capitol Hill for about $3,000, for my wife, my three kids, and me. There are apartments available in these areas at much lower rates. If we set a payment standard tailored to each zip code, we could still meet the goal of letting families access these higher-cost neighborhoods, including the schools there and the proximity to employment and public transportation, but in a more cost-efficient way that would let us use those dollars to serve other families who could be afforded the same opportunity.

Greg Jaczko: And this is within the purview of the DC Housing Authority. It doesn’t require the federal government to make a change, right?

Kevin Corinth: That’s correct. The DC Housing Authority has that autonomy, so it could set a different payment standard. In their plan for the upcoming fiscal year 2027, they’ve actually proposed, or at least suggested, moving to neighborhood-specific payment standards, which I think is a good thing. But they still want to tie them to 168% of the fair market rent in each area. So while it’s good that we’d have zip code–specific payment standards, they would be, in my mind, far too high.

In the Capitol Hill zip code, I think it would be a little over $7,000 as the payment standard for a three-bedroom apartment. If you know the Capitol Hill rental market, that is very high. There are some places that go for something like that, but they’re very nice houses. It would be great if everybody could live in a really nice house, it would be amazing if we had the resources to do that, but we simply don’t. This is a fixed pot of federal funds, in some cases supplemented by local funds, and most families aren’t getting anything at all. It would be much better to have reasonable payment standards tailored to about the middle of the rent distribution in each zip code, and then let families rent apartments up to that amount instead of up to these much higher payment standards.

Greg Jaczko: In your analysis, did you look at, say, 120% of the fair market rent and determine how many more families, or what percentage more, might be able to get into the program?

Kevin Corinth: Unfortunately, we have a data availability problem, and that’s one I’m hoping to tackle in future work. The DC Housing Authority doesn’t publish the full distribution of property-level rents among voucher holders. We really want to know how many voucher holders are renting apartments at or near the payment standard. Many are not, right? No one is claiming that every family with a voucher is renting an apartment at the $5,300 payment standard for a three-bedroom. But the limited data I’ve seen suggests that many families are renting apartments above at least the fair market rent of each zip code. What that tells me is that you could serve more families by adopting these lower payment standards. But we won’t know exactly how many until we can get that property-level data, where we’d know the contract rent for each unit, to answer the question precisely.

Greg Jaczko: So your solution is a twin approach: reducing the percentage and moving to a neighborhood-specific fair market rent. Combined, you think those would expand the program to more families while still giving families the opportunity to live in the more desirable neighborhoods that offer better schools, better services, and all of those things?

Kevin Corinth: Exactly. And there’s actually research on this, looking at what happens when a city maintains a high payment standard versus adopting these small area fair market rents, where the payment standard varies across neighborhoods. What researchers find is that you actually get more movement of low-income families to high-opportunity areas with small area fair market rents than with uniformly high payment standards. So I think you could not only serve more families but also do a better job of getting low-income families into some of the higher-cost, potentially higher-opportunity neighborhoods.

Greg Jaczko: Okay, we’ve covered a lot, and I think this has been a really great explanation of the program. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up?

Kevin Corinth: Only to wish us godspeed on getting better data, and then hopefully we can follow up with you soon once we have a better idea of exactly how many families these solutions could serve.

Greg Jaczko: And I might add, before we wrap up: we have an election in a week and a half, and we’ll have a lot of changes in DC government. What do you see as the prospects for a potential new mayor or new City Council looking at these issues and considering some of the ideas you’ve presented?

Kevin Corinth: I’m always hopeful. I think our likely new mayor, the Democratic candidate, seems attuned to the problems with the voucher program and wants to make sure we’re not overpaying landlords and that we can serve more families. I’m sure I’m not going to agree with everything they do in every area, but I think this is an area where common sense would dictate lowering the payment standard, making it neighborhood-specific, and serving more families. So I’m hopeful the incoming mayoral administration and the City Council together can arrive at something more reasonable.

Greg Jaczko: Well, thank you for those thoughts. Hopefully they’ll get you the new data you’re looking for, and when you have it, hopefully you’ll put it together and share it with all our readers here at Capital Commonsense.

Kevin Corinth: Will do.

Greg Jaczko: Well, thank you, Kevin. That was Kevin Corinth talking about DC’s voucher payment standards and the DC housing voucher program. Thank you for joining us, Kevin, and sharing your thoughts on these ideas. You can read Kevin’s full analysis on our Substack, Capital Commonsense. Go there to see all his numbers, lots of graphs, and all the analysis behind the conversation. And remember, everyone: subscribe, share this episode, and tell us what you think. I’m Greg Jaczko. Thanks for listening. This has been the Capital Commonsense Podcast.

Subscribe now

Our needle swings between mayors whose records show how progressive city government is working in practice. On one end is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. On the other is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

When Lewis George signs a bill, releases a budget, names a deputy mayor, or launches a program, the model will score it. The needle is our way of differentiating between what we view as a successful model of progressive governance and an unsuccessful one. Today’s post explains how the model will work.

Why Johnson and Mamdani

We picked two mayors who generally have the same ideological views as Lewis George. In a column for City Cast, I explained Lewis George’s two progressive peers: “the popular and pragmatic New Yorker, or the true believer who’s under water in Chicago” and the two paths she could pursue as an executive. Over the coming months, our model will seek to evaluate in a rigorous way which path she takes.

Brandon Johnson is the cautionary tale, as he has run into the wall on budgets, public safety, and his relationship with the city’s employers. A move toward Johnson means a decision that adds costs, drives away investment or jobs, or treats ideological goals as more important than results. His approval rating has reflected this dynamic.

Zohran Mamdani is the other end. He ran on an ambitious left-wing platform, but has been focused on how the city functions and delivery of basic services. He has also abandoned or significantly scaled back campaign promises like free buses or childcare. A move toward Mamdani means a decision that pursues progressive goals in a pragmatic way—growing the economy, being fiscally responsible, and advancing good government. The Capital Commonsense team generally thinks he’s been doing a good job.

To be clear, neither mayor is a perfect symbol and their actions will not always align with the needle. Mamdani is only 10 months into his term, so his record is not as robust. The two mayors are shorthand for different approaches to blue city governance. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu would present a similar comparison, although Mayor Mamdani is clearly more YIMBY on housing than Mayor Wu.

What we’re actually scoring is the substance of each of Lewis George’s decisions, using the criteria below. The model will be scoring each action, not the Capital Commonsense team.

Two examples from their records

Here is how two real decisions would score. The net score is the sum of an action’s scores, offering a quick read of which way it pushes the needle.

The efficiency commission. In May 2026, Mamdani appointed a charter revision commission to clear bureaucratic barriers that slow city projects and to modernize budget practices. Its proposals go to voters in November 2026. It scores +2 on bureaucracy rather than +3 because a commission is a starting point, not a result. (NYC Mayor’s Office)

The Martinez firing and short-term loan: In December 2024, a school board Johnson had just appointed, after the previous board resigned en masse, voted unanimously to fire CEO Pedro Martinez without cause. At the center of the dispute was Martinez’s opposition to a high-interest short-term loan Johnson’s team wanted to cover new district costs. Pushing out an experienced schools chief for resisting the mayor’s fiscal plan scores −2 on appointments, the borrowing push −2 on budget, and the leadership turmoil −1 on education. (Chalkbeat)

The 10 criteria

Every action is judged against ten questions. Each one has a Johnson end and a Mamdani end.

A few of these deserve some explanation:

• Budget isn’t a test of whether spending is good or bad. The District has real fiscal problems, and the question is whether a decision treats taxpayer money as finite. A new program paid for by cutting a weaker one can score well. New spending with no offset or new spending that’s not a good economic investment will not score well.

• Education asks one thing: is this good for students? Not for adults in the system, not for a particular institution. Students.

• Appointments asks whether the person has the experience and track record to run the agency they have been put in charge of. Many appointees are both loyal and qualified, and that’s fine and to be expected. Loyalty only counts against a pick when it seems to be standing in for experience.

How the needle moves

Each action gets a score from −3 to +3 on every criterion it affects. Negative scores move toward Johnson, positive scores toward Mamdani.

With respect to the last row, a school policy doesn’t get a zero for housing. It gets no score at all, so it can’t drag the housing average up or down.

From there, the math is short:

1. Each criterion’s score is the average of every score it has received over the administration.

2. The needle is the average of all ten criterion scores, converted to a scale from −100 (fully Johnson) to +100 (fully Mamdani). A criterion that hasn’t been touched yet counts as zero.

3. The needle’s reading falls into one of five bands: Even (within 15 points of zero), Leans (15 to 45 points) or Strongly (more than 45 points) toward either mayor.

Because the needle averages all 10 criteria, no single action can pin it to one side. Early on it will move quickly. As the record grows, each new action moves it less, reflective of a long record.

An example

If Lewis George streamlines permitting for home renovations, here’s how the model would score it.

The other five criteria stay blank. If this were her first action, the needle would read +23, Leans Mamdani.

Keeping the scoring fair

Some of the criteria overlap, so the model will follow a few rules to keep one decision from counting twice for the same effect.

• Bureaucracy vs. housing and small business. Bureaucracy scores the process change itself: fewer steps, faster approvals, simpler rules. Housing and small business score what that change does for the people building homes or running businesses.

• Economic development vs. jobs. Economic development is about growth and the tax base: new businesses, new investment, new residents. Jobs is about employment. A major development project might score on both. A hiring program scores only on jobs.

• Appointments are weighted by the job. A cabinet-level pick like the police chief, the schools chancellor or the city administrator can score up to ±3. A seat on a smaller board or commission counts for ±1.

What the needle can’t do

The needle is a transparent judgment call, not a scientific instrument. Every score reflects the model’s read of a decision, and reasonable people will sometimes disagree with it. A few limits are worth stating up front.

• It weighs actions, not outcomes. Crime rates, test scores and job numbers depend on far more than any one mayor. We score the decisions she controls and note the results as they come in.

• It treats all 10 criteria equally. You might care more about public safety than education or the reverse. The needle doesn’t know that, and the scorecard below the dial lets you see each criterion on its own.

• It can only score what’s public. If a decision happens out of view and we don’t know about it, it won’t show up until it does.

We will begin entering decisions as the Mayor-elect begins to make them and update readers periodically.

Last month, a few dozen labor organizers, faith leaders, and rideshare drivers rallied on the steps of the Wilson Building to oppose Councilmember Charles Allen’s autonomous vehicle (AV) bill. I used to drive for Uber and Lyft, so I went to hear the drivers’ concerns and learn what they wanted changed.

Subscribe now

It turns out they didn’t want anything changed. The rally was organized by the People First Transportation Alliance, a coalition of murky provenance and membership. Its website says it “strongly oppose[s] the legalization of fully driverless vehicles in any city or state where they are currently prohibited,” and it wants a “trained human driver to be physically present behind the wheel of any vehicle operated for hire.” In other words, their backers don’t want an AV discussion at all.

Labor organizers, faith leaders, and rideshare drivers protest robotaxis on the steps of the Wilson Building, October 6, 2026. Photo: Greg Rogers

A week later, Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, now mayor-elect of DC, announced that she opposes Allen’s bill too, citing jobs concerns. She said “DC must be a leader in welcoming new technology while supporting workers and prioritizing safety,” but warned that DC shouldn’t “rush.”

I’ve worked on AV policy for more than a decade, and I’ve never seen a bill proactively do so much for workers. I’ve also never seen a bill draw this much opposition from the very people it goes out of its way to help. Allen’s bill makes AV companies pay for the speculative impacts of their services before they carry a single passenger, and directs that money to human drivers and public transit.

Turning down this deal won’t keep robotaxis out of the District forever. It’ll just stop AVs from delivering safer streets and more accessible rides for residents in the near future. In the meantime, District workers and public transit will miss out on the money that’d be collected from AV companies.

Sharing the wealth

“Pro-worker” AV policy usually boils down to one of two things: forming a study committee that reports back in two years, or requiring every AV to have a human driver. (The latter is the logical equivalent of requiring every horseless carriage to have a horse.)

Allen’s bill seeks a more proactive approach of requiring AV companies to pay up for any potential harms of offering their services before there’s any harm to pay for.

Allen’s bill would charge AV companies at nearly every step: a fee to apply for a permit, a fee to put vehicles into operation, a fee for every mile driven, and renewal fees.

For the two companies already testing in DC, Waymo and Zoox, that adds up to millions of dollars over time. And, because the per-mile fee is applied to every trip, the money scales up alongside the services.

All of this money goes into a dedicated Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Fund, which will fund public transit and a workforce program for drivers who may be impacted.

I have my own doubts about robot taxes as a tool for navigating automation. But you don’t have to be a fan of a robot tax to see that Allen is giving advocates exactly what they have demanded for years: when machines take on the work that was previously done by a human, the company should help pay for the transition.

If that’s not a robot tax, I don’t know what is – and if that doesn’t qualify as “supporting workers,” I’m not sure what does.

The workforce math

It’s clear that Lewis George’s central concern is the displacement of driving jobs – and she’s already given a number: about 200 District residents are full-time drivers. Some of the drivers who spoke at the rally, and at a Council hearing in July, discussed how they’re struggling to make ends meet – partially because Uber takes a meaningful cut out of each fare.

Fortunately, there’s some good news for these drivers if AVs start operating in DC. A new report from Gridwise indicates that AVs may actually lead to an increase in rideshare drivers’ per-trip earnings by pushing companies to take a smaller cut out of each fare.

Over a two-year period ending in Q2 2026, the median platform fee per trip fell from $2.61 to $2.25 in AV cities. In the meantime, the platform fees rose from $2.97 to $3.54 for drivers in non-AV cities.

In cities with autonomous vehicles, Uber and Lyft’s median cut per trip fell from $2.61 to $2.25 between Q2 2024 and Q2 2026. In cities without AVs, it rose from $2.97 to $3.54. Source: Gridwise

And not only that, but Gridwise also found that drivers in AV cities saw faster growth in gross pay per trip than drivers in non-AV cities. Atlanta’s rideshare drivers experienced the largest increase (20.7%), more than twice as much as drivers in non-AV cities (7.8%).

Gross pay per trip, before tips, grew faster in every AV city than in non-AV cities from Q2 2024 to Q2 2026. Atlanta led at 20.7%, more than double the 7.8% non-AV average. Source: Gridwise

One of the biggest misconceptions about AVs is that they lead to a sudden and complete transition away from human drivers. Phoenix and San Francisco are two of the most mature AV markets in the world, and you can still hail an Uber, a Lyft, or a taxi in these cities. Allen’s bill would make DC’s rollout even slower, by capping how many AVs each company can run at first, and allowing fleets to grow gradually with DDOT’s permission.

AVs didn’t replace human drivers one-for-one in Phoenix and San Francisco. Instead, they increased competition and pressured Uber to take a smaller cut out of drivers’ earnings. They created well-paying jobs of the future that didn’t exist a decade ago, like AV and EV technicians, fleet supervisors, and depot managers. These are the types of jobs and investments that DC should be welcoming at this time of economic uncertainty.

Waymo has already secured three locations in the District, which Axios reports would bring hundreds of jobs for maintenance technicians, autonomous specialists, and vehicle cleaners. On their own, that could match or exceed the estimated 200 District residents who drive rideshare full time – and that’s before other AV companies come to DC.

It’s also important to realize that DC isn’t starting from scratch. The District already treats worker displacement as a public responsibility, which is managed by the Department of Employment Services (DOES) and training programs like IGNITE DC, which prepares residents for careers in transportation and logistics. (Lewis George sits on the Council committee that oversees DOES.)

Allen’s bill adds dedicated money on top of these programs to retrain drivers, paid for by the companies themselves.

Let’s be clear. Workers got nothing like this from earlier waves of automation. When word processors and computers emptied out DC’s typing pools, taxpayers covered the unemployment insurance and retraining, and the software companies didn’t pay a cent.

Lewis George’s own mayoral platform promises intensive job support, more registered apprenticeships, and help for unemployed workers. The bill’s training fund is built for exactly that work – so if Lewis George continues to oppose the bill, she’ll be turning down a dedicated revenue stream for her own agenda.

The missing voices

Standing in front of the Wilson Building, I kept thinking about people who weren’t there to make their voices heard.

I thought of the families of the 276 people killed on DC streets since 2020, and the many thousands more who were seriously injured. I thought of my riders who told me stories about being left at the curb because they used a cane, relied on a service dog, or lived in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River that some drivers refuse to go to.

Others have no way of knowing they should be advocating right now. They’re the families who will lose someone in a crash over the next few years, and don’t know about the tragedy that lies before them – a tragedy that can befall any of us unlucky enough to be in the path of distracted, speeding, or reckless drivers.

DC’s traffic safety measures have been failing for over a decade. Mayor Bowser launched Vision Zero in 2015 with a promise to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024.

In 2015, 26 people died on DC roads. By 2023, the number doubled to 52, a 16-year high.

At least 50 more people were killed on DC’s roads in 2024, the year that traffic deaths were supposed to be zero.

This isn’t for lack of effort. The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) has made real investments in redesigning streets, lowering speed limits, and encouraging alternative transportation modes like biking, walking, and transit. The city has even placed more traffic cameras in high-risk intersections and key thoroughfares. But over 70% of traffic fatalities in 2024 were attributed to dangerous driver behaviors including hit and runs, single vehicle crashes, and/or red light running.

The Safe System Approach reminds us that infrastructure alone can’t eliminate traffic deaths, because you also have to address who’s behind the wheel. AVs won’t replace every driver, and they won’t be absolutely perfect, but the published crash data indicates Waymo is achieving significant reductions in injury-causing crashes – regardless of who’s at fault.

Across 271.3 million rider-only miles through June 2026, Waymo had 95% fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse, 82% fewer injury-causing crashes, and 93% fewer pedestrian-injury crashes than average human drivers covering the same distance in the same cities. Source: Waymo Safety Impact

Allen’s bill still doesn’t assume that every AV company is equally safe. AV operators must navigate multiple levels of approval before they can operate, and DDOT will be granted far more enforcement power than regulators have in other states where AVs already carry passengers at scale.

If opponents want to frame this as lives versus jobs, they should say what exchange rate they’re offering. How many preventable deaths are worth slowing a gradual transition for 200 drivers, especially when the bill already pays to support those drivers?

“Rushing” for 14 years

DC isn’t rushing. It has been studying AVs longer than almost any city in America:

• 2012: DC passes one of the nation’s first AV laws.

• 2018: Mayor Bowser forms an AV Working Group.

• 2020: The Council requires DDOT to deliver a full-deployment report by fall 2022.

• 2022: The deadline passes with no report.

• 2024: DDOT finally issues a request for proposals for the study.

• 2025: A congressional budget freeze halts the study before its December deadline.

• 2026: Allen introduces his bill in May. The Committee on Transportation and the Environment holds a hearing in July, where Lewis George attends and gives opening remarks. A committee markup vote is scheduled for next Monday, November 9th.

After 14 years, “too fast” starts to mean “never.” Every year of delay is another year without the worker fund, another year without the new transit money, and another year without a safer way to get around.

Take the deal

Waymo already carries paying passengers in 15 U.S. metro areas, and AVs are coming to this region one way or another. Blocking Allen’s bill won’t stop them – it will just mean DC gets them later, without realizing the benefits of putting the robot tax income to work sooner.

Allen’s bill gives District residents a safer, more accessible option to get around. It gives public transit new, much-needed money. And it gives drivers a path into the jobs AVs create, paid for by the companies doing the automating.

Labor’s allies have been asking for exactly this kind of deal, and they should take it.

Greg Rogers is the founder and executive director of The Innovation Majority, an advocacy organization for the policies that bring beneficial transportation technology to cities. He previously worked on public policy at Waymo and Nuro, and he once drove for Uber and Lyft.

Ashley Schapitl: Mayor Williams, thanks again for doing this. I’d like to start with your perspective from the tax hearing. You spoke so eloquently about how much of the expansion of D.C.’s social safety net over the last 20 years was made possible by achieving your goal of 100,000 new residents and bringing new people and new business to the city. How do you think about the success story of the 2000s and 2010s, as Councilmembers look at how to diversify and reinvigorate our economy after a tough stretch with the rise of remote work and DOGE?

Mayor Williams: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on Common Sense. Let me lay out some major premises. One is that D.C. is different from other cities. It’s a very attractive, beautiful city with a great history. It’s the capital of our country. It’s a city that has a predilection for growth. If you get out of the way, the economic engine we’re able to build and energize has produced tremendous growth over the years.

Look at the D.C. budget. When I was around, it was about $5 billion; now it’s $20 to $22 billion. That’s an indicator of huge growth. It’s like bleed air off an engine: the core engine produces the taxes and the spinoff that create that budget. And 80% of that budget goes to social services.

Premise number two, the point I made to the Council: over the last 10 or 12 years, about 80 to 85% of the enormous growth in public goods came from growth in the economy, not from taxation.

Another premise is compounding. People understand present value. Take all your factors, inflation, risk, and look over a 20-year period. You’re going to gain enormously more public good from growth in the economy than by messing with this core engine, breaking it, and finding yourself with a problem.

My last premise was that if you promise everything to everyone, you’ll find yourself unable to do anything for anyone. That’s where we were in the ‘90s. We had an underpowered government budget, partly because of federal restrictions, but also because of our own impairment of revenue inflows, sending the wrong signals, bad management. I could go down the list. You have to reverse all that to get the economy growing again.

What does that mean? It means you have to be very judicious and cost-conscious about the choices you make. Why would you start programs with one-time funding and then continue the funding? I don’t understand that. Why would you keep funding programs that were special to COVID?

When people say, “This is a critical program, and we need taxes for it,” that’s the biggest budget canard in history. It’s what’s called the Washington Monument ruse: “If you cut my budget, I’ll have to deconstruct the Washington Monument.” No. What about the other $21 billion in the budget?

What I was telling the Council is: we’re not trying to be Texas. What people want to see is that you’re taking a comprehensive approach to the difficult decisions facing us, that you’re making those decisions, and that you’re leveraging them to put us in a better place. Because be assured, we’re going to face difficult decisions. The real question is whether we make stupid difficult decisions or wise difficult decisions.A wise difficult decision is like a garden. You prune the garden today, and it grows back more robustly in the future.

Ashley Schapitl: One of the things you’re best known for is bringing baseball back to the city. It shows how in tune you were with what it took to attract private-sector investment and business to the District. What do you think are the most important things for the new mayor and the Council to consider on economic diversification and attracting investment, learning the lessons you did in the early 2000s?

Mayor Williams: The important thing is to look at your balance sheet. Look at your assets as part of your balance sheet; revenues are a big part of your assets. What do I need to do to protect, preserve and sustain, let alone grow, these critical revenue streams? We like to demonize high earners, but we need to treasure them. They’re paying [about] 70% of the government, and they don’t ask for a lot of services in return. They’re like our oil wells: leave them alone and let them produce. Why is this hard? What signals can we send to bring more investment to the city? I’m very confident that if we send the right signals, more investment flows to the city: more jobs, more amenities, and the public goods we’re looking for.

On the budget side, I would take a deep look at Council oversight and invest in serious oversight. I’ve told them [the Council] this: they need highly competent, well-paid professional staff to dig into these agencies, the way Congress has professional staff to dig into the federal budget. We’ve got to dig into these agencies with real oversight and pay attention.

Number two, I would spend time not just on the budget impacts of legislation. Legislation can be dumb but balanced in the budget. The real question is: is it economically feasible? Does it hurt our economic competitiveness? We need to ask that question. Maybe the city auditor needs to opine on it, or a Council committee, or the CFO. I don’t care. Somebody needs to be saying that this legislation, while it can be paid for with new taxes, is not economically sound.

A ship can go down by the head. It can go down by the stern. It can go down perfectly balanced. You can have a perfectly balanced budget while the city is losing economically year by year. It’s like a business: a business can have a balanced budget and still be in an economically unsound position.

Subscribe now

Ashley Schapitl: The Council was focused on the particulars of each individual tax policy without stepping back and saying: Our population growth has fallen off a cliff since 2019. How do we get those people back?

Mayor Williams: Thank you. Absolutely right. A major signal, which is what I was trying to tell them, is this: Our people aren’t saying “cut the top income tax rate by 5%.” We’re saying, send a message that you’re looking at expenditure reductions as part of an overall package, short-term and long-term, to get the city back in balance. Taxes could be part of that package. But it can’t be the first thing you go to without any initial analysis on the expenditure side.

Ashley Schapitl: I think your point about COVID-era spending is particularly important. You often hear the Council talk about needing to find money to continue COVID-era programs, like rental assistance, and trying to fill the hole left by federal funding.

Mayor Williams: Absolutely.

Ashley Schapitl: That’s certainly been a big cause of the year-after-year one-time funding.

Mayor Williams: The other point I made to the Council is about inequality. There’s what I’d call iconic inequality reduction. I make myself feel good because on paper I’m reducing inequality by taxing high earners more. Yes, that addresses inequality in an iconic way. But if you’re taxing high earners more and the money goes to programs that are flatlining in actual effectiveness, have you really reduced inequality? No. You’ve made yourself feel good, but you’re not really reducing inequality.

What a lot of people like me, who live in the District and pay taxes in the District, were saying is: spend the money on things that actually produce a result. If joblessness isn’t really changing, poverty isn’t really changing, truancy isn’t really changing, I can go down the list. Let’s stop, take a break and reevaluate how we’re deploying our funds.

Ashley Schapitl: Another area to discuss is the collapse in investment in the housing sector, and the struggles of affordable housing with non-payment and everything else we’ve heard about. From your perspective, what are the most important signals the new mayor and the Council can send to get housing investment going again?

Mayor Williams: This is another area where growth matters. The District is susceptible to growth. And capitalism, properly regulated and delimited, look what it’s done around the world over the last 30 years to reduce poverty. It’s a profound engine for addressing inequality if you let it run the right way. I’m not talking about Ayn Rand, just let it run. I’m saying that in a blue-state setting, it can produce powerful good.

What I’m trying to say is that we have the ability in D.C. to send the right signals, work with the investment community, with stakeholders and providers, and with tenants, like we’re doing with the Federal City Council and Housing Unity D.C., and move toward a situation where the economy produces natural affordability. You’ll produce far more housing by getting supply and demand to meet naturally than by trying to fill in gaps. Not that I’m against filling gaps. I’m just saying we’ll get more mileage out of the former.

Ashley Schapitl: So much of what kicked off the housing boom that started under your mayorship was that there was demand for housing because people were coming in.

Mayor Williams: Absolutely.

Ashley Schapitl: Getting back to the city meeting the goal of 100,000 additional residents that kicked off under your mayorship: when you set that goal, what did you think was most important for attracting the young professionals and families who have helped reinvigorate the school system and grow the tax base over the last 20 years? Was it better schools, lower crime, better services, some combination? What mattered most for getting people to move to the District rather than Northern Virginia or Maryland?

Mayor Williams: I thought D.C. is an inherently beautiful city, with amenities and a history that can’t be reproduced anywhere else. If you restore respect for the city by showing you’re dedicated to a government that works, and you stay focused on the same policies, it pays off. It’s like Warren Buffett talking about how investment compounds. I think good policy compounds.

You start building core agencies back. There’s a Washington Post article that talked about this. Something I started, Adrian [Fenty] doubled down on, and a series of mayors through Muriel [Bowser] have built on it, and it’s compounded positively. People give me a lot of credit, but if I didn’t have good mayors following me who were dedicated to customer service and government effectiveness, and we all had our failings, it wouldn’t have worked. It compounds powerfully.

In government, especially with work rules, it’s hard to make changes. You really have to prioritize and focus. But if you stay focused and always pivot back to your core two, three or four things, when you look back five or six years later, you’re making headway.

Ashley Schapitl: As an ANC commissioner, I notice that at the Council level there’s a lot of talk about issues from a national perspective. But what I hear about at the ANC level is very basic stuff. Did my trash get picked up? Are the garbage cans at the park being emptied every day?

Mayor Williams: Nobody elected you to be Secretary of State. They elected you to take care of potholes. That’s true for the mayor and true for the Council. We’re not here to solve all the world’s problems. One, we don’t have the bandwidth. Two, if you try, it can be anti-competitive.

Ashley Schapitl: That was really noticeable to me at the tax hearing. There was talk about how ordinary and capital income are treated differently at the federal level, and about the California billionaires tax. I was thinking, none of this is our responsibility. You can’t fix the federal tax code in a city of 700,000 people. No Washington resident expects the Council to fix these much bigger-picture problems. They just want the basics to work.

Mayor Williams: I agree. You have to be very careful about what you try to do on a local government budget. On a national level, I do think there should be more progressivity in taxation. But that’s a national issue, not a local one.

Ashley Schapitl: That was very notable to me because I support higher capital income taxes at the federal level. But when you’re a city of 700,000 people and someone can move a mile across the bridge and still keep their job, it’s a different calculation.

Mayor Williams: Absolutely, it’s different. And there are two kinds of bandwidth when you’re running a city. One is your revenues. The other is your capacity as a government. We keep adding new programs to face very difficult challenges when we’re not showing people we can do basic things really well. I hear people complaining about the same things I was dealing with, and we’re back to complaining about them again. Why are we adding new things when we need to pay attention to the basics? I don’t want to pick sides, but I give the mayor credit for saying, let’s stop and focus on the basics.

Ashley Schapitl: A lot of people in my ANC district scratch their heads when they hear about things like a new childcare program. They say, I support that in theory, but my trash didn’t get picked up last week. My last question: if you could wave a magic wand and encourage the Council and the new mayor to do three specific policy things next year to send a good signal to business, attract investment and reverse our population decline, what would they be?

Mayor Williams: One, I would work with the advocates and stakeholders in education to double down on it as a top priority. We’ve made great headway.

Ashley Schapitl: I’m so glad you brought up the schools, because that’s one of the real bright spots across the city.

Mayor Williams: We need to leverage that now with our middle schools and high schools, and with real work on truancy. These are problems I had, and we still have them. We need to address them. That’s number one.

Number two, come to a grand bargain on housing, along the lines I talked about, where people are paying their rent again. This is critical. It’s an important message to send to the world.

Number three, send a message to the world that whatever happens with the Trump administration, we’re dedicated to continued improvements in public safety. That’s an important signal.

And lastly, show that we’re looking at both sides of our fiscal picture as part of a comprehensive package, short-term and long-term. Not just our revenues, their incidence and fairness, but the huge exposure on our expenditures, and that we’re making tough decisions to bring them back in line. Those would be powerful signals to the world.

Ashley Schapitl: I’m glad you brought up rent non-payment. I first heard about it a couple of years ago. As you know, a lot of developers come to ANC meetings. In December 2024, a developer came to ours asking for an extension on their PUD because they couldn’t find financing. They told us they were struggling to maintain operations and conditions in another of their buildings, because almost four years after the pandemic, only 75% to 80% of residents were paying any rent at all. They said you just can’t operate housing this way. It was taking 12 to 18 months to process non-payment cases through the Landlord and Tenant Branch, and they were at their wits’ end. And the problem is basically no better two years later.

Mayor Williams: We want more [entrepreneurs] in our city. We want more minority developers in our city. Some of the developers hardest hit by rent non-payment were startup minority developers. How do you start a development company? You buy land and you rent. If people don’t pay your rent, congratulations, you’ve bought a business that doesn’t work.

Ashley Schapitl: Well, thank you so much for your time, Mayor Williams.

Here’s some context: Among the many tax changes and provisions of HR 1, passed by Congress in 2025, the legislation authorized a new credit against federal taxes for taxpayers who donate to a “Scholarship Granting Organization” or SGO. SGOs receive donations from individuals and use donated funds to award scholarships to students to support educational expenses.

Subscribe now

HR 1 stipulates that, in order for students in a state to use scholarships funded by FSTC-eligible donations, their state’s Governor must “opt in” to the program (taxpayers in a state that doesn’t opt in can still take the credit by donating to a fund in another state, but their donations will benefit children in the other state). So far, 31 states with both Democratic and Republican Governors have done so. As of now, Mayor Bowser, who holds the responsibilities of a Governor for DC, has not. In her remaining time in office, she should. And her successor-elect, Janeese Lewis George, should call for or avidly support such a decision, because it would help advance some of her stated goals and make it easier to solve some challenges her administration will need to address.

What are FSTCs and how do they work?

A quick primer on how these tax credits work: A taxpayer makes a donation to a state-recognized SGO. That taxpayer then receives a dollar-for-dollar, nonrefundable credit against federal taxes of up to $1,700 for each dollar they donate ($3,400 for married couples filing jointly). This means that taxpayers can essentially choose to redirect a dollar of their money away from federal taxes to scholarships for kids at no cost to themselves. (This may be particularly appealing to taxpayers who disagree with some of the current administration’s spending priorities.)

SGOs then use the funds they receive from donations to award scholarships to eligible students. Under the statute and regulations, an eligible student includes a child who is eligible to enroll in public elementary or secondary school and has a household income no higher than 300% of the area median income (just under $500,000 for a family of four in DC, which captures about 86% of DC students). While students receiving scholarships must be eligible to enroll in public school, they can be enrolled in a public, private, charter, or home school. Scholarships can cover costs for private school tuition but can also cover a wide variety of other eligible educational expenses, including tutoring, other supplemental education programs, specialized services for children with disabilities, books, supplies, and education technology and equipment (with some limitations) for students in private, traditional public, or charter schools.

Tax Credit Scholarships and SGOs were originally created to support private school choice, and 18 states currently have some form of state education scholarship tax credits and SGOs that award scholarships for children to attend private schools. For this reason, some local and national organizations that oppose private school vouchers also oppose the FSTC program. But, crucially, the statutory language of HR 1, and proposed regulations released by the U.S. Treasury Department last month, do not limit FSTCs to supporting private school scholarships.

Equally important, a taxpayer taking the FSTC cannot direct their donation to a specific student, and eligible SGOs may not limit their scholarships only to children at a single school. This prevents wealthy taxpayers, or schools, from using the FSTC primarily to benefit themselves, their own or closely related children, or their children’s school. But beyond these parameters, there is considerable flexibility to design SGOs for a variety of purposes. HR 1 and Treasury regulations do not allow states to impose restrictions on eligible SGOs beyond federal requirements. But there’s nothing to prevent an SGO from choosing to focus on a specific type of schools (e.g. charter schools or schools within a particular school district) or students (e.g. English language learners, low-income children, or children with disabilities).

Prominent national advocates and education finance experts have argued that, because of how the FSTC program is designed, it presents a potentially promising new source of funding for public schools, and have urged states to opt into the program to allow their schools to tap this new source of funds. I’m not as sold on some of these arguments as they are, but I do think that, done well, the FSTC could provide a tool to help support DC students and solve some of the challenges DC now faces.

What could FSTCs mean for DC schools and students?

If every eligible DC taxpayer donated to an SGO and took the maximum credit, that would generate more than $427 million. That level of uptake is highly unlikely, though: In the initial years of new tax benefits, take-up rates are closer to 2-3%. Even that relatively low take-up, though, would generate $8-12 million annually for DC students, and concerted outreach from SGOs, participating schools, and tax providers could result in higher amounts.

A key factor in considering the likely impact of FSTCs is the strength and focus of the SGOs that are likely to operate in a state. Standing up an SGO takes time and work, particularly since these organizations need to be pretty narrowly focused on granting scholarships. Private school scholarship granting organizations, which already exist to administer purely private or state tax credit scholarships in some states, have an early mover advantage here.

That’s a potential concern in DC, because the District already has another, federally funded, private school scholarship program: The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, created by Congress in 2004 and authorized under the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act (SOAR), currently provides $17.5 million in funding for private school scholarships for low-income (ie, less than 185 percent of poverty) D.C. resident K-12 students . The program is administered through an intermediary, Serving Our Children, which supported 1,409 students to attend private schools in 2024-25 (the most recent year for which Serving Our Children has released data). If D.C. opted into the program, Serving Our Children could be well-positioned to administer additional FSTC scholarships. Historically, demand for OSP has fallen short of available vouchers (in part because the program may only award scholarships to private schools in D.C. and in part because families who receive a scholarship must apply and be admitted separately to the private school of their choice). In recent years, however, the number of applicants for the program has exceeded those it could fund, and the increased income cut-off for the FSTC scholarships could expand the pool of families eligible.

However, private scholarships wouldn’t need to be the only game in town: Multiple existing SGOs and national organizations have launched or are working to launch SGOs designed to award scholarships to public and charter school students across multiple states. For example, the Future School Fund, founded by former DC State Superintendent of Education Deborah Gist, partners with states, public schools (including charter schools), donors, and families to provide scholarships for public school students, working with school districts and charter management organizations to identify educational opportunities that best meet the needs of their students, particularly tutoring and before/after school programs, and to connect eligible students with scholarships for those opportunities. If D.C. opted into the FSTC program it could also choose to partner with an SGO (or SGOs) with a focus on public and charter schools to support outreach, engagement, and administration of scholarships to DC donors, schools and families. Because the Mayor has control over DCPS, she could also work with DCPS leadership to ensure they are positioned to work with partner SGOs so that the program benefits DCPS schools and students.

Done thoughtfully, this approach could address a number of needs in D.C.:

• High-impact tutoring: From 2022-2024, D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education used federal COVID relief funds to stand up an implement a district-wide high-impact tutoring (HIT) program to accelerate learning for students during the pandemic recovery. Although many states and districts invested in tutoring post-COVID, DC’s approach has been uniquely well designed and effective; an evaluation by Stanford University found that students who received the tutoring improved reading and math scores and attendance. Despite this, public funding for the program has been curtailed dramatically since COVID relief funds expired. Private philanthropy, organized through the CitySchools Collaborative, has been able to fill the gap. But sustaining HIT investments over the long term and ensuring they reach all students who need them will require additional funding sources. Opting into FSTC and partnering with a public school-focused SGO would enable D.C. to expand access to effective tutoring for more students. Even the low end estimate of likely funds generated by the FSTC for D.C. would come close to what OSSE spent on the HIT program in its first three years.

• Before, after, and summer care: Beyond high-impact tutoring, finding and paying for out of school time care remains a major challenge for many D.C. families. D.C. provides funding for before, after, and summer care through a dizzying array of funding streams, and DCPS and charter schools also cover parts of the costs of some programs. But supply is still not adequate to meet all families’ needs, and some families can’t afford the costs, particularly now that D.C.’s child care subsidy program, an important source of before/after care funding for some families, is under a waitlist. FSTC funds can support scholarships for before, after, and summer care for students enrolled in DCPS and charter schools, helping to close this gap. As I’ve argued elsewhere, if funds were sufficient, DC could also partner with an SGO to direct subsidy-eligible families to access FSTC-funded scholarships for before- and after-care, allowing the District to prioritize child care funds for infants and toddlers.

• Mixed Delivery PreK: Children’s eligibility to receive FSTCs is conditioned on their being eligible to enroll in a public elementary and secondary school. In D.C., 3- and 4-year-olds are eligible to enroll in public school, which means that, as I read the statute and recent draft regulations, those from families with incomes below 300% of area median income should also be eligible for scholarships funded with FSTC funds. This could provide a useful tool to address some gaps in D.C.’s otherwise strong preK program and enable more community-based child care providers to offer publicly funded preK. Most states provide preK through a “mixed delivery system” that includes both public schools and child care programs that meet certain standards. That’s also the case in D.C., where our mixed delivery includes charter schools as a robust third sector. However, the vast majority of preK slots are in DCPS and public charter schools, with less than 1,000 out of about 14,000 preK slots in community-based programs. Community-based child care programs that meet preK requirements can receive funding through the PKEEP program, administered by OSSE. But that program has faced cuts in recent years, in response to District fiscal pressures, and as a result OSSE has not funded new community-based providers to offer public preK slots. A consortium of private child care providers could band together to create a new SGO that would offer scholarships for preK students enrolled in child care centers that meet high standards of quality. This could provide more families the opportunity to keep their child in the same early childhood setting until kindergarten, stabilize the financial operations of child care providers who have struggled financially without preschool students, and address gaps in preK supply in some parts of the city, such as Capitol Hill and Ward 3. It would also provide a potentially more stable source of funding for current PKEEP grantees than local funding, which has been subject to annual budget battles for the past several years.

These are some of the benefits D.C. could realize from opting into the FSTC program, and there are likely others. Given that DC already has a federally funded private school choice program, and there are a variety of other provisions in place in federal law to prevent wealthy families from using FSTCs to self-deal, the potential downsides of participation are low. Moreover, if D.C. decides not to opt in, that doesn’t mean local taxpayers won’t use the credit—it just means their donations will flow to children in other states.

Earlier this year, when I asked officials affiliated with the Bowser administration what the District was planning to do regarding opting into the FSTC, I was told that they were waiting to see the regulations. Well, now the regulations are out, and since they make clear that public and charter school students can still benefit from FSTC’s there’s a lot of good reason to opt in. At a time when D.C. faces fiscal pressures that limit our ability to invest in the educational supports our students need, we just can’t afford to leave this money on the table.

The District benefitted for most of the 21st century from a prolonged boom in the construction of apartments and condominiums, mostly in quasi-greenfield areas like NoMa, the Navy Yard, and the Wharf plus infill construction on riot-scarred commercial corridors like 14th Street, U Street, and H Street NE. This has been in some respects a tremendous YIMBY success story — the Economist touted NoMa as “the YIMBYest neighborhood in America” — but it actually took place without much in the way of YIMBY reforms. The land available for these kind of projects is inherently limited, and the District is running low on it. To push growth forward we absolutely need the kind of land use changes that Lewis George championed on the campaign trail.

And yet, zoning reforms alone do not cause new housing to develop out of the ether. The blunt fact is that investor interest in DC projects has collapsed. This is in part a downstream consequence of economic woes from elsewhere, but it’s in part a cause of those woes since new construction and new residents are the lifeblood of the city’s public sector economy.

Addressing the thicket of non-land use regulatory concerns that have made our city an unattractive destination for real estate investors is going to be a challenging problem. George has already committed publicly — albeit non-specifically — to addressing the crisis of non-payment of rent afflicting many of our buildings. Clearly having confidence that you will be able to fill your building with paying customers is the sine qua non of anyone wanting to build in the first place. But not only are there an overlapping series of regulatory burdens on housing operators that need to be untangled, the question of investor confidence is simply difficult objectively. Large buildings are very expensive to build, and the thesis is that the investment will pay off over a long span of time. This necessarily involves not just an estimate of the current outlook, but guesses about the future. The statements and track-record of most of the rising political stars in DC are not friendly on any level to profit-seeking businesspeople, with a result that they are inclined to go seek their profits elsewhere.

A mayor who wants to achieve her stated goals is going to have to address both the substance and the psychology of investor reticence, and one of the best ways to do that would be to move quickly and decisively to roll back — or ideally scrap — the city’s misguided Inclusionary Zoning rules, a set of policies that sound nice but actually ensure that our housing shortage will never be solved no matter what the mayor or the council do on any other topic.

Subscribe now

How D.C.’s Inclusionary Zoning Works

Exclusionary zoning is when a city or town takes expensive swathes of land and zones them exclusively for single-family homes built on large lots. You can see mild forms of exclusionary zoning at work in the rowhouse neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, Logan and Dupont Circles, and other in-demand parts of the city. More egregious versions are in place in Wesley Heights, Spring Valley, American University Park, and other tony neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park. Even more egregious versions are plentiful across the border in the suburbs, perhaps reaching its highest manifestation in the so-called Agriculture Reserve of Montgomery County, in effect an ultra-large-lot zoning rule that requires all homes to be expensive.

If exclusionary zoning is bad, then inclusionary zoning sounds like it should be the opposite.

But this is a sleight of hand. Inclusionary zoning does not mean that apartments and rowhouses are allowed everywhere, it means that apartments and condominiums get hit with extra regulatory burdens. Notably, the presence of aggressively inclusionary zoning policies in the District of Columbia does not mean we lack exclusionary zoning. They are in fact two forms of anti-housing policy imposed in tandem. First, apartments are banned in large swathes of the city thanks to exclusionary policies. Then across most of where they are allowed, their construction is penalized thanks to “inclusionary” policies.

The core baseline IZ rule in DC is that any steel and concrete building with ten units or more must set aside 8-8.33 percent of its floor area for units that are sold or rented at non-market rates to families who meet specific income criteria — either 60 percent of DC-are Median Family Income (adjusted for household size) for rentals or 80 percent for condo projects. In effect, it’s a tax on new market-rate development to create subsidized homes. If you attempt to build with cheaper wood materials, the tax goes up and you need to set aside 10-12.5 percent of your floor area for subsidized units. Starting in 2021, the city created additional IZ+ rules raising the tax up to 20 percent of floor area for projects that required zoning changes to be permitted. Most recently, the city adopted two phases of IZ-XL, expanding the geographic scope of IZ requirements and also applying them to conversions of buildings from non-housing to housing uses rather than just to brand new construction.

Notably, despite IZ-XL office-to-residential conversions in the downtown central business district are still exempt from IZ. Martin Austermuhle recently noted that downtown conversions are the one remaining bright spot for residential investment in the city, and it is probably no coincidence that it is easier to attract investment dollars to projects you are not also burdening with punitive taxes.

There are tons of specific administrative problems with the District’s specific IZ process. Over and above the basic burden of the mandate, actually getting apartments filled with qualified residents in this city involves an unnecessarily slow and cumbersome process. These problems are a kind of double disaster. On the one hand, building an “affordable” unit is useless if nobody actually gets to live in the unit. On the other hand, while no investor particularly wants to build a unit that he is forced to rent out at a loss to a low-income tenant it is much worse to be forced to build a unit that is not rented to anyone at all. Emilia Calma of the DC Policy Center has provided much thoughtful testimony about how to improve administration of this program and steps along these lines would be welcome.

But it is also worth saying that the core problem with IZ is not with the administration of its details. It is a fundamentally bad idea, in principle, that never should have been adopted and certainly should not have been expanded. The intention to help low-income families with their housing costs is laudable, but the IZ mechanism imposes enormous costs on the city’s economy while doing literally nothing to help the most vulnerable. Even with totally optimal administration, IZ ensures the housing shortage will never end and should be scrapped.

IZ guarantees housing scarcity

The thought behind IZ is easy enough to understand. When a city is facing a housing supply shortage, granting permission to build new market-rate units creates a kind of financial windfall. By mandating that some of the floor area be dedicated to subsidized units, you cut into the windfall and also address the folk objection that new luxury housing doesn’t do anything to help the needy.

You can’t take the politics out of politics, but it is worth saying that the folk objection is factually mistaken. Housing scarcity is like a game of musical chairs in which someone inevitably gets displaced because there aren’t enough chairs to go around. Adding new chairs — even if they are high-end chairs that only affluent people can afford — leaves more of the existing stock of chairs for everyone else and reduces the pace of displacement.

But beyond politics, the core problem with IZ is that it both exacerbates scarcity by making it less attractive to build new units, and also relies on scarcity to generate the financial windfall that covers the cost of creating the new units. In a well-functioning housing market there is intense competition between developers and landlords and the price of housing is approximately the cost of construction. In a balanced market like that, IZ would make all new projects financially infeasible. Indeed, because the IZ tax is not small — especially under IZ+ for projects that require zoning changes — it shuts down new construction well before the market achieves balance. This is part of the explanation for how the District could end up in its current dead zone.

A weak economy means rents have fallen enough that investors no longer want to build. But comparing housing costs in DC to those in low-cost markets shows that we are still in a state of housing shortage. Under current policies, if the District’s economy recovers housing costs will soar and displace many families before demand becomes robust enough to re-ignite construction. And that’s the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic scenario is that the current fiscal crisis will push the city into a downward spiral of weaker demand where the construction bust continues and eventually the housing shortage evaporates because nobody wants to live here.

A much better idea is to suspend, roll back, curtail, and repeal IZ policies as quickly as possible to try to restart the construction market. IZ rollback will complement the upzonings George has promised and serve as a credible commitment that the administration understands the value of market-rate housing.

It is true, of course, that without IZ fewer “affordable” units will be built. But building more overall units will accomplish more for citywide affordability. It’s also worth saying that while the 60 percent of MFI threshold is a significant discount, these programs do not help the truly poor. MFI is analyzed on the basis of the entire DC metro area, which is very wealthy, so 60 percent equates to $68,850 for a single person or $88,500 for single mother of two. We’re talking about a program that raises average rents citywide and reduces construction activity without doing anything at all to help our neediest residents. A far better way to help those in need is to simply have a strong economy and use general tax revenue to meet social needs.

The fiscal cost of a shadow tax

Last but by no means least, it’s worth evaluating IZ in the context of the District’s current budget crisis.

There are two ways to plug a budget hole, cut spending or raise taxes. Nobody on the Council seems particularly interested in either of those options which is why, as Stan Veuger observed, there is currently so much focus on the idea of creating exotic new taxes rather than raising existing rates. I’ve been referring to IZ as a kind of targeted tax on new construction. But it’s a shadow tax that does not raise any actual revenue, and in fact significantly reduces tax revenue. The District, for starters, levies property taxes on residential real estate so any regulation that impairs construction tends to depress revenue. But new market-rate units are also important because they bring new market rate residents to the city.

In particular, while during a boom time it’s easy to disparage “yuppie fishtank” projects — large buildings full of mostly one bedroom units targeting affluent young professionals as residents — as not meeting our highest aspirations for the city, these kind of residents are major fiscal assets. The District levies a marginal tax rate of 8.5 percent — higher than the top bracket in Maryland or Virginia or 40 other states — on income between $60,000 and $250,000. Singles in that bracket consume few city services and contribute a lot of revenue, over and above being prime customers for the city’s food service and entertainment industries. Over the past 20 years, even as the fundamentals of the YIMBY analysis of housing regulation have become more and more mainstream, local policy has become more and more hostile to these kind of developments. Our first IZ statute was adopted in 2006, it was fully implemented in 2009, the AMI rules became more stringent in 2017, and then we added the IZ+ and IZ-XL rules in subsequent years.

None of this — but especially not the considerable Bowser-era tightening of IZ regulations — was consistent with the city’s stated housing production goals. A new mayor with appropriately higher aspirations for housing production and a wholly correct determination to roll back exclusionary zoning should pair that with an attack on exclusionary zoning’s phony opposite.

One contest is getting real attention, however: Initiative 86, which would prohibit the sale of foie gras in D.C., among other related activities.

On its face it’s niche — there are no D.C. producers of foie gras and only a handful of high-end restaurants serve it. But over the past few days a controversy has erupted over whether the I-86 summary language we all see on our ballots accurately reflects the underlying legislation, which appears much broader and could implicate a number of other food products that are decidedly not “luxury.” And, echoing other recent initiatives, we again see popular DC-based restaurateurs jumping into the fray as a counterweight against the “pro” side.

I’m not necessarily opposed to a narrow ban on foie gras sales, though I’m pretty allergic to ballot initiatives that target D.C.’s struggling restaurant industry, which has been in the crosshairs before and is still attempting to adapt to voter-approved increases to the tipped minimum wage.

So, what’s the problem? After all, D.C. is progressive, and these initiatives need to be approved by voters.

As someone who cares about this city and has been through the battles of past initiatives, I don’t like that outside groups are, pardon the pun, force-feeding us their policy wishlists each election cycle. D.C.’s petition-driven initiatives have been bankrolled almost entirely by outside donors, according to an analysis of public data.1 These are people and groups who don’t have to deal with the fallout of both the process — often highly contentious — and the often-poorly drafted legislation it produces, which skips the deliberation our elected Council is charged with and typically needs significant clean-up afterward

Of course, it’s not surprising that non-D.C. residents would contribute financially to efforts they support in other jurisdictions, but the data show that the funding to get ballot initiatives in front of D.C. voters is not just external, it is extremely concentrated. With the exception of I-83, every petition-driven initiative that made the ballot since 2014 has been majority funded by a single organization.

Take I-86. The group behind it, Pro-Animal Future, was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Boulder.2 Denver voters rejected its slaughterhouse ban 65–35 in 2024, with unions, agriculture and both parties opposed, and its proposed fur ban failed 58-42 the same night. Denver is also voting on a Pro-Animal Future-pushed foie gras ban this November. A Cheyenne-based foundation whose grants go almost entirely to vegan advocacy gave Pro-Animal Future $475,000 in 2025 — the year they came to Washington — up from $76,500 in 2024.

It’s also not surprising that national interest groups would target D.C. What happens in our humble city — with a population that sits between El Paso and Oklahoma City — gets disproportionate national attention, and that earned media helps with fundraising. Since we are just a city, a few hundred thousand dollars is enough to support signature collection across the 20-odd square miles of space that D.C. residents actually live in. And with registered Democrats making up more than 75% of voters — higher than any state by a wide margin — a measure that tilts D.C. further left is likely to pass. For niche, progressive interest groups, that’s a pretty attractive combination.

Some of these initiatives have faced opposition. In the case of I-77 and I-82, the “anti” side actually raised more (though it also took a greater local share than the “pro” side). But the money flowing into D.C.’s ballot initiative contests is overwhelmingly from outside our city and region.

History of D.C.’s ballot initiative process

Ballot initiatives aren’t unique to D.C. Many states have them, with varying rules for qualification and scope. D.C.’s initiative system sits in three layers.

1. The Charter is D.C.’s constitution — Title IV of the 1973 Home Rule Act, written by Congress and ratified by D.C. voters in 1974. Ballot initiatives were not included in the original charter but were added via an amendment that became effective in 1978. D.C.’s charter now establishes what is in and out of bounds (ballot initiatives cannot appropriate funds, and courts have added other limits), signature threshold (5% of registered voters citywide and 5% in at least five of D.C.’s eight wards), when a qualified initiative will be presented to voters (“the next general, special, or primary election held at least 90 days after the measure is received”), what vote it takes to pass (majority), and the standard the ballot summary must meet. Amending the charter would require a Council act, a citywide referendum, then 35 days for Congress to weigh in.

2. Initiative, Referendum, and Recall Procedures Act of 1979 (§ 1-1001.16) was passed to implement the Charter amendment and set the rules for the Board of Elections’ “proper subject” review, the “true and impartial” summary, and petition drafting and circulation, and established a 180-day signature window. These details could be changed via an ordinary act, subject to a 30-day congressional review.

3. The Board of Elections’ regulations are the third layer — DCMR Title 3, Chapter 10, covering petition form, signature validity, challenges, watchers, certification and the rules for non-resident circulators.

More than 150 initiatives have been filed since the process opened in 1979, while fewer than thirty have qualified for the ballot. Money is likely a big part of this. The pesky signature gatherers you might run into at Eastern Market on a Saturday afternoon or at the exit of a Metro station are usually paid, and there’s an entire industry that’s popped up to support these efforts.

1. The ballot initiative process starts with a proposal being filed with the Board of Elections, which rules on whether the measure is a “proper subject” for initiative. The Board rejected a 2009 anti-gay marriage initiative on those grounds and courts struck a 2006 gambling initiative for the same reason.

2. If the proposed legislation clears, the Board writes a short title and summary, and the proposer has 180 days to gather signatures.

3. Once those hurdles are cleared, the measure is put to a vote in the next election, per charter rules.

4. An initiative passes if a majority of the people who vote on that question approve it, and there is no minimum turnout requirement.

Even if a ballot initiative receives a majority of “yes” votes, that’s no guarantee it will become law.

• 2014’s I-71, which sought to legalize recreational marijuana in D.C., has famously languished for years because Congress – led by Andy Harris (R-MD) – has continually included riders in budget bills prohibiting D.C. from spending money on implementation. What we got instead was gray market outfits across the city, which in some cases have been associated with criminal activity. It took more than 10 years for the Council to finally crack down on so-called “gifting” shops.

• 2018’s I-77 (the first tipped minimum wage initiative) was passed during the June primary. It received about 56% of the votes cast on the initiative, but overall turnout for the question was under 20%, meaning fewer than 10% of registered D.C. voters approved the measure — 47,230 yes votes out of 479,723 registered voters. That fight split the restaurant industry badly, pitting activists against many servers and local business owners. The Council repealed it 8–5 four months later.

• I-82 returned the tipped minimum wage question to voters in 2022, passing with 74% of votes cast. In 2025 the Council slowed and shrank the phase-out of the relevant wage. The groups behind both initiatives have since sought to challenge the Council’s moves, but so far they’ve failed.

• 2024’s I-83 (ranked choice voting) passed with 73%. The Council funded the ranked-choice part but declined to fund a second provision focused on opening up D.C.’s primaries.

• Finally, 2020’s I-81, which decriminalized entheogenic plants (remember those magic mushroom posters?), also passed and took effect as written in March 2021. I-81 is the only initiative D.C. voters have passed since 2014 that hasn’t been blocked by Congress, repealed outright, slowed down or selectively funded.

More on the Way

Massachusetts-based One Fair Wage is behind a live initiative process that could be decided in a special election next year. I-87 would raise D.C.’s minimum wage to $25 by 2029 and eliminate the tipped wage by 2031. It missed this November’s ballot after a lawsuit from a D.C. bar owner stalled its signature drive. If it makes next year’s special election ballot, it will represent the third attempt by an outside group to force a wage hike in less than ten years, in a city where restaurants are still absorbing the costs from I-82 and struggling with an anemic economy.

Then there’s I-88, which would freeze residential rents for two years, with another 12-month freeze any time inflation runs above 5%. It missed this year’s ballot after two property owners sued the Board of Elections and stalled the signature drive. A judge threw out three of their claims in September. If passed and implemented, I-88 would be another blow to D.C.’s housing market which is suffering in part due to the well-known problems in our housing permitting and tenant laws.

The Council is Taking Up Some Reforms

On October 6 the Council voted 10–2 for a bill to overhaul the initiative process — the Fairness and Accountability in Initiative Reform Amendment Act of 2026. The bill would reform the process by limiting each initiative to a single subject; giving the Attorney General and the Council’s general counsel 30 days instead of 15 to weigh in; and requiring a fiscal impact statement before an initiative is accepted. Councilmember (and likely our next mayor) Janeese Lewis George voted present; Councilmembers Parker and Silverman opposed reform. See City Cast DC’s coverage and its earlier explainer.

More is needed

The planned reforms are welcome, but others should also be considered. Unfortunately, most of these will require amending the charter.

1. Disclose non-D.C. funding. California’s DISCLOSE Act makes ballot measure advertisements name major funders. California also prints the top three funders on the first page of its official voter guide for referendums to overturn a law, though the disclosure doesn’t extend to ballot language. D.C. could require disclosures on advertisements to include the geographical source, but the ballot summary itself is a harder target. The charter requires the summary to accurately reflect the measure’s intent and meaning, and funding disclosures might be considered extraneous.

2. A participation floor. Massachusetts requires a measure to win a majority on the question itself and to be approved by at least 30% of everyone who cast a ballot in that election. Italy goes further and voids any abrogative referendum where fewer than half of eligible voters turn out, which is why its 2025 referendums focused on labor laws and citizenship failed even after winning a majority of votes cast. A D.C. version that set a minimum threshold on turnout or share of registered voters indicating approval could have stopped I-77, which only 9.85% of registered voters affirmed. This would require a charter amendment.

3. A higher bar for passage. South Dakota and North Dakota are both asking voters this year to require 60% ballot approval for constitutional changes, and Utah wants 60% for initiatives that would raise taxes. A higher threshold would force ballot initiative advocates to appeal to more Washingtonians. This would also require a charter amendment.

4. General elections only. I-77 passed in a June primary with under 20% turnout. That November, turnout was roughly 46%. D.C.’s closed primary system means registered Democrats tend to have a stronger incentive to turn out during primaries; the winner of the Democratic primary for ward council seats, mayor and other offices will almost always go on to win the general. Restricting initiatives to general elections – not primary or special elections – would likely improve the representativeness of the electorate. Again, this would require a charter amendment.

D.C.’s initiative process exists so residents can directly exact change when the Council or Mayor isn’t listening. But what it’s become is a cheap, high-visibility venue for national advocacy groups. There’s a place for direct democracy in our city, but changes should be driven by those who call D.C. home, not outsiders.

Joe recently wrote a piece for Capital Commonsense about a new tax concept, the business activity tax. He examines how the proposal would work, how it fits with the taxes DC businesses already pay, and the legal and economic questions it raises. This is a complicated tax policy question, and Joe is here to explain it and offer his thoughts on what the District should weigh as it considers the idea. Welcome, Joe.

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Thank you, Greg. Great to be with you.

Greg Jaczko: Before we start, maybe you could tell us a little about yourself, your work in DC and why you’re part of the DC community.

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Sure. I’ve lived in DC for over 20 years. I’m originally from California, but I’m proud to be a Washingtonian and to participate in local government as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 5.

My day job is as a lawyer advising federal and state governments on tax policy. Much of the year I’m hopping on planes to state capitals all over the country, blue states, red states and everything in between, suggesting good ideas and warning against bad ones. Last time I counted, I’ve testified or presented in 38 states. So I joked at the hearing that it was good to finally put this skill to use at home, where the DC Council is debating revenue measures.

DC’s tax framework

Greg Jaczko: That’s great, and we’ll talk at the end about your testimony and what the DC Council and the mayor can do on these issues. But before we get into the details of the business activity tax, it might help to set the stage with some of the unique aspects of the DC tax system. The Home Rule Act limits what the DC government can tax. Could you talk about that, and then about the kinds of taxes businesses already pay in the District?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Sure. The Home Rule Act prohibits any tax on the whole or any portion of the personal income of nonresidents of the District, either directly or at the source. In other words, no taxing Maryland and Virginia commuters. Congress wrote that into the city charter. It was not handed over to the city as part of the grant of home rule, and it’s not an accidental restriction. DC lobbied very hard in the 1970s to be able to tax Maryland and Virginia commuters, and the idea popped up again in the 1980s, the 1990s and more recently. Congress didn’t budge. It’s still in there.

Then there are a number of court decisions. The most significant is the Bishop decision, no relation to me. It held that the restriction applies even to creative workarounds. The Home Rule Act says you can’t tax Maryland and Virginia commuter income. Bishop says that even a tax supposedly on business, if it hits Maryland and Virginia income, is also not allowed. You can’t do it directly, and you can’t do it indirectly. That’s the framework a lot of these new proposals have to operate in.

Greg Jaczko: And what kinds of taxes do DC businesses pay right now? The business activity tax would not be the only tax on DC businesses.

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Right. When people started talking about a business activity tax a couple of years ago, it left me confused more than anything. First, I work in states all over the country and I’d never heard of a business activity tax. So what is this idea, and why does it have traction here in DC? That’s what led me to research the Bishop situation, which is the why.

Second, we tax business a lot in DC. Businesses pay a lot of money in taxes. We have the corporate franchise tax, which is essentially a corporate income tax, a tax on profits: if a C corporation has more revenue than expenses, it pays. Partnerships, sole proprietors and LLCs pay the equivalent, the unincorporated business tax, or UBT. We also have a payroll tax that came in when we adopted the paid family leave program a few years ago, and it has tripled since we originally adopted it.

There’s the property tax on commercial properties. At one point, commercial property, about 2% of the properties in the city, generated 37% of all DC property tax revenue. It was a huge cash cow. It’s really been hurting in the last few years, and that’s probably a driving factor in DC’s slow revenue growth: the hit to the commercial property sector.

On top of all that, we’ve got a tangible personal property tax, essentially a business inventory tax. It’s not a huge dollar amount, about $80 million a year out of our $21 billion budget, but it’s a huge pain compliance-wise. Every business and nonprofit in the city has to fill out this form. About 60,000 forms a year go to the DC Office of Tax and Revenue, but only about 1,500 of them actually owe anything, and most of the revenue comes from 300 firms.

I’d love to see that last one restructured and fixed, because that’s the kind of thing that drives me mad: a tax that raises money from a very small number of firms but inflicts huge compliance costs on a whole lot of people. I’ve had clients who couldn’t get their Clean Hands certification because they made a mistake on this form, and OTR doesn’t really do anything with the forms because only a couple hundred firms actually pay.

On top of all that, there are license fees, the bag fee and the ballpark fee, and businesses collect the sales tax. Businesses pay a lot more here than in Virginia, certainly, and probably more than in Maryland. So I do get my back up when somebody says business needs to pay its fair share in DC, because I think it does.

How the business activity tax would work

Greg Jaczko: So let’s turn to the business activity tax. Can you explain what it is, how it’s intended to work, where it’s coming from, who’s proposing it and the ideas behind it?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: It first popped up in the late ‘90s. DC has a tax revision commission every decade or so that’s supposed to give the Council recommendations on improving the tax code. We had one in 1998, and some of its ideas were implemented. We had one in 2013, and almost all of its ideas were implemented. Then we had one in 2023 and 2024 that failed to produce recommendations.

The business activity tax came up in all three. It was a recommendation in 1998. It was not a recommendation in 2013. And the reason the 2023–24 commission broke apart was disagreement over the business activity tax.

The idea behind it is to do two contradictory things: tax the income of Maryland and Virginia commuters, while not violating the Bishop decision by not directly taxing that income. So how on earth do they do that?

The concept, which has been very elegantly and carefully designed by the people who did it, is to tax all businesses on their receipts. It’s a gross receipts tax, not a profits tax, so unprofitable businesses would pay it. Any business with revenue would pay, minus certain subtractions: $200,000 per business, rent, purchases, capital investment, royalties and what you pay in franchise tax. The goal of the subtractions is to subtract everything out except the Maryland and Virginia commuter income. That’s the theory.

The 1998 commission was very excited about it. The 2013 one, not so much. On the 2023–24 commission, some people were excited about it and some were very worried. I think the worry comes from this: if you tweak the BAT at all, it collapses. Say you decide to tax royalties, so you take out that subtraction. Or you want more revenue, so you take out half the subtractions. Or you don’t like that unprofitable businesses would pay it, so you limit it to profitable ones. Or you think nonprofits shouldn’t have to pay, so you exempt them.

Once you start tweaking the BAT, the whole thing collapses, either in its ability to generate revenue, its ability to get around the Bishop decision, or maybe even as a flashpoint that provokes Congress. What I said at the hearing was that it’s very elegantly designed, almost like a Jenga tower. And I think there was fear in the business community that it won’t be this elegant thing that subtracts everybody out and narrowly hits Maryland and Virginia income. The fear was that it would just be a sixth tax layered on top of the other five.

The legal risk

Greg Jaczko: Let’s assume it worked exactly as intended. How would it avoid or comply with Bishop if it is, in effect, an indirect way of taxing commuter income?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: That’s a good question, and one proponents try not to mention: there is legal risk with this approach. It’s possible that it doesn’t get around the Bishop decision. The answers I’ve gotten when I’ve asked are some variation of: Bishop was many decades ago, there are new judges, maybe they’ll reach a different result.

There is a sentence in Bishop saying that if the tax were on businesses as businesses rather than on income, that would be a different question. I think a lot of stock is put in that sentence. But I’ll note that the Home Rule Act says you can’t tax commuter income either directly or at the source, which is what this tax would do. So I don’t know if it would actually get around Bishop.

It’s not my first time talking to policymakers who really want to do something that carries high legal risk, so I’m used to people saying, “Whatever, the courts will figure that out.” But it’s important to note that the courts may not move very quickly.

The example I used at the hearing is what Maryland just went through. In 2021, Maryland passed the first-in-the-nation tax on digital advertising. It was another tax that someone somewhere had designed and said, “We’ve designed it so it will hit out-of-state companies and not anyone in Maryland, so it’s perfect for you, Maryland policymakers, to vote for.” They passed it, and it was challenged in court on several grounds: the Commerce Clause, due process, the Internet Tax Freedom Act and so forth. Two months ago, in August of this year, it was struck down. Now Maryland has to refund something like $500 million plus interest, which is a lot of money even for the Maryland budget.

That took five years: passed in 2021, struck down in 2026. All that time, people had to comply with it and pay it, and now Maryland has to refund all that money. That is a risk DC takes on if it passes a tax like this, one that’s untested legally and doesn’t really exist anywhere else. There’s a somewhat similar tax in New Hampshire, so there’s a lot of argument in these debates about whether we’re like New Hampshire or not.

Greg Jaczko: If you had to put a number on it, what’s the risk that it ultimately fails in the courts?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: If it’s designed exactly as the designers have laid out, applying to everybody including nonprofits, with the subtractions they have and the credit against the franchise tax, I’d say maybe a 30% risk. If they start adding things like “we’re only going to tax DC,” or someone says out loud, “This tax is designed to do what Bishop doesn’t let us do,” or it’s really designed that way, or they put things in that show that’s the intent, I think you get over 50%.

Why the Council is looking for revenue

Greg Jaczko: Obviously there are reasons for this. Can you talk about why the Council is looking at this idea, and at revenue ideas in general?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Revenue growth is slow in DC, and people point to a lot of causes, some of them right. DOGE certainly reduced incomes in DC. A lot of people lost their jobs or had to move out of the city altogether. Interest rates are very high right now, which is stalling the building industry and the job growth that came with it for many years. And we’ve had the hit to commercial property I described, with more remote work. Since COVID, a lot of people no longer commute into downtown DC five days a week. Even if they come in three days, that’s a 40% reduction from what it used to be.

None of these are DC-specific trends. They’re national and global trends, but they’re heavily concentrated on us because of our geography and how our economy is structured, so it’s really hitting us. At the same time, costs are growing, so the spending side of the budget continues to grow. People in the know say there’s about a billion-dollar structural gap between what we spend and what we bring in.

Some of that comes from the federal money that went to the states, including DC, during COVID to launch new programs, expand existing ones, keep people at work, and keep them supplied with wages and food and their rent paid. As the emergency receded, that federal money receded too, and states, including DC, have had to decide which programs to keep and which to let lapse. The Emergency Rental Assistance Program, for example, is a debate in the Council every year: do we keep this COVID program going? Do we fund all of it, part of it or none of it?

That’s what has driven the growth of our budget from $15 or $17 or $18 billion to $21 or $22 billion, while revenue has grown much more slowly. So for the last couple of years, the Council has struggled to patch things with one-off tax increases on small items and by drawing down reserves, in the hope that if we just make it to next year, commercial property will recover, DOGE will be done, the tourists will come back and everybody will be back in the office five days a week. It’s been a hopes-and-dreams approach. I think everybody is coming to the realization that we actually need to make hard decisions about revenue and spending, probably next year, to balance the budget.

Greg Jaczko: How much revenue do proponents think the business activity tax would generate?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: Their estimate is $500 million a year. With a billion-dollar structural gap, that’s a big part of it. But it also means you’re not paying down the payroll tax or the tangible personal property tax or reducing any of the other business taxes.

That would be at a 2% rate. Proponents point to New Hampshire as the example, and New Hampshire’s rate is 0.55%, about a quarter of what they’re talking about for DC. New Hampshire also has no income tax and no sales tax at all, so it’s a very different competitive environment. This would be a fairly unique thing for DC to do. It’s a bit of a walk on the wild side, and it really has to be done right if they’re going to do it at all.

The hearing and the new Council

Greg Jaczko: That brings us to what happens with a new mayor coming in and a new Council. You recently testified for over two hours at a hearing where a number of ideas were discussed. What are your thoughts on what the Council is looking at, including the business activity tax, and which ideas have merit?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: As you mentioned, I testified for two hours. The whole hearing was about seven hours, and I was there for almost all of it; I had to leave before the last panel spoke. Where I was sitting, I was roughly opposite Councilmember Lewis George. There’s only so much you can read from body language, but I was trying to see what she was engaging with, nodding at or shaking her head at. I imagine other people were trying to pick up on those cues too.

She ran on the idea of a business activity tax. I don’t know if she ever called it that, but that’s what she was referring to when she spoke of closing loopholes for businesses that aren’t contributing to DC’s economic base and having them pay their fair share. In remarks during the hearing and afterward, she said something like, it sounds doable if we do it right. That’s what I was saying too: make sure you do this right.

We’ll see. The mayor only signs it at the end of the day; it’s the Council that drafts and designs these things. I think the votes are there in the new Council to do something like the business activity tax. I think the votes are also there for what’s called a net investment income tax. I don’t know why we rename things that already have names; that’s what it’s called at the federal level, but the DC name apparently is the Wealth Proceeds Tax. It’s a 2% or 3% surcharge on investment income, dividends and capital gains, taxed in DC.

There was a lot of discussion at the hearing about whether it would cause tax flight. Mainly it was Councilmembers saying it won’t cause tax flight and trying to get witnesses to argue with that.

Greg Jaczko: What’s your take?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: It will create a big tax differential. The only state in the country with a special tax like this is Minnesota, and they just enacted theirs, very recently, so we’d be number two. We already tax this income under the individual income tax. This would be a special tax that taxes investment income and capital gains more heavily than wage income in DC. Virginia’s income tax rate, for instance, is 5.75%. I think ours on this income would add up to 13-point-something percent, essentially double Virginia’s.

Is that going to cause people to move or shift income? I don’t know. Tax flight is real. California has a billionaire tax on the ballot, and seven of its roughly 200 billionaires have moved out of the state, saying they don’t want to risk having to pay it. So some people do move. It’s not as many as some argue.

But the unseen thing that’s really hard to measure is the business that doesn’t expand, the second location that never opens, the decision about whether to make your next investment here or somewhere else, and then it goes somewhere else. The only real evidence you see of that is when economic growth and revenue growth flatline, which is roughly the situation we have in DC.

The outlook

Greg Jaczko: Looking ahead six to 12 months, where do you think DC will be on tax policy? Will the Council enact the BAT or some of these other proposals? And where do you see revenue and spending? Will we be eating into that $1 billion structural imbalance, or will the District still be struggling with it?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: There was a lot of discussion at the hearing that we need to look at spending too. I hope so, but that’s what the budget process is supposed to be for: the mayor presents a budget, and the Council modifies it or presents its own alternative.

Anybody who interacts with the DC government sees the apathy from some employees, the duplication and the waste that’s out there. I hope that’s all on the table, but a lot of it means hard decisions about services and whether we need to be number one at everything. I love the articles Capital Commonsense has been doing, digging into questions like why our Medicaid spending is number one. Is it because we’re providing the highest-quality care? No. It’s because there are some goofy things in there that some people take advantage of. If you pick up a lot of rocks in DC agencies, you’ll find things like that underneath.

I wish we were able to do more of that and root it out, because the alternative is that whatever is left over, we’ll have to raise taxes to cover. I think you’ll hear a lot of debate about that in 2027. Even this year, in 2026, Mayor Bowser proposed closing something like $600 million of the gap, not quite all of it, through programmatic reductions: we’re just not going to do this anymore. The Council accepted some of that but put about $300 million back, paid for with one-time reserves, one-time tax increases and similar measures. That’s kicking the can down the road, and there’s only so much road left, because we’re running out of one-time measures.

Closing

Greg Jaczko: I appreciate your thoughts on this. As we wrap up, is there anything we didn’t touch on that you wanted to discuss?

Joe Bishop-Henchman: I’ve been very pessimistic, so I should say something optimistic. I live here, I love DC, and I think we have a lot going for us. Structurally, we have one level of government and a one-chamber legislature. In other places, you have to get the mayor to sign off, then the county, then go through the House and the Senate. Here it’s a lot flatter and more streamlined, or at least it could be. If we wanted streateries on every corner, or wanted to attract a football stadium, it’s a lot more streamlined and faster for us to do it.

We ought to think about what other things we want to encourage and make happen in DC. We have built-in advantages in tourism and hospitality. How do we leverage them, and treat them not as a cow to be milked or a golden goose to steal eggs from, but as something to build on? We have world-class transportation and a great location. Everybody wants to be in DC at some point in their lives. So what do we do to leverage those things?

Greg Jaczko: That all sounds like great fodder for future Capital Commonsense posts, so hopefully you’ll keep writing.

Joe Bishop-Henchman: And I’m excited that we’ll have a lot of new faces on the DC Council and a new face in the mayor’s office. Up in New York City, the new mayor said some things that maybe frightened some people, but I think the consensus is that in office he’s been doing what he can to make city services work, build on New York’s advantages and make things sustainable and fairer. I hope we can do that too in DC.

Greg Jaczko: Great. Thanks for those positive words to close out. This was Joe Bishop-Henchman on the proposed business activity tax and many other tax policy issues here in DC. Thanks for joining us. Remember to subscribe, share this episode and tell us what you think. I’m Greg Jaczko. Thank you for listening. This has been the Capital Commonsense Podcast.

WMATA updated faregates [Left: before, Right: after]

WMATA vs. peer transit systems

When WMATA decided to replace gates the first time in 2021 under previous General Manager Paul Wiedefeld, it was quickly deemed a failure due to their lack of successful hardening and physical blocking. Thus, the gate system eventually received multiple rounds of fixes rather than one big refresh in 2021. While each of these were better than what proceeded, they failed in that both major purchases were incremental. The current gate height stands at 4.6 feet, which is still shorter than the 6- and 7-foot systems recently installed at BART and LA Metro respectively.

It is one thing to make a bad purchase, or a flawed pilot. However, making a bad fleetwide purchase, learning the flaw in it, and then replacing that with something still not fit for purpose is indicative of poor planning. Even after a systemwide faregate replacement and a major systemwide retrofit, fare evasion in 2026 is above every single month of the year prior.

Standards of success

Some purport that we should be happy with incremental reductions in evasion, such as the big fall-off since the peak of the pandemic. However, the strategy of acquiring incrementally better gates that are partially effective has been costly, and necessitated the continued use of WMATA Special Police to enforce fare evasion on an hourly basis.

While police presence will always be required on transit to address fare evaders with weapons or outstanding warrants, or respond to violent crime. Nonetheless, harder gates would reduce the need for routine fare enforcement work like issuing citations. Station managers explicitly do not enforce fare evasion given the potential threat of violence. This swap in how police are used ultimately lets police concentrate on what matters most.

Between the cost of additional police resources, crime committed by people who never even tapped in, and continual tinkering with gates below what other transit systems are purchasing, bad gates are a bad policy.

Higher quality gates reduce evasion over the long term, and have the straightforward potential to save money both from increased fares and decreased costs.

Given that WMATA purchased from the very same manufacturers that BART and LA Metro used, there is a very real chance that the same purchase will have to happen three times to get what could have been purchased initially.

Strategies to reduce evasion without full replacement

Although the series of decisions that led to two gate replacements within a five year span are tragic, there is still a good case to be made that hardened gates could make a difference where fare evasion is most prevalent.

Given that the average station only has around 200 instances of evasion on a weekday, going after the highest traffic stations would be a simple strategy to have high impact without a full replacement. Stations like Union Station, Gallery Place, and Metro Center with seven hundred to one thousand people evading payment would help discourage evasion without necessarily putting a new gate at every entrance and exit. When people hop the gates in Rockville or Reston, they would face the impossibility of exiting without payment in Metro Center.

Although for some stations like Gallery Place there are alternatives to exit in, for stations like Reagan National Airport this would be much less feasible.

The clear ROI of improvements

If efficiency and good stewardship are important to WMATA, state of the art gates are necessary. Rather than tackling this problem for good with a maximalist gating strategy, WMATA ended up purchasing two sets of ineffective gates. The result? Stations like the newly built Dulles Airport station have more than twelve percent of their riders not paying at all.

For an alternative strategy, high-tech and nearly unjumpable gates would pay dividends around the clock. This differs from the current strategy of having MTPD staff stations with multiple police officers to issue tickets that will have the majority of them in DC thrown out.

The bureaucratic inertia of MTPD enforcement feels good, but ultimately subverts the solution of having better gates that work every single second that Metro is open.

Given that focusing on a few stations that are either key destinations with high traffic or have few alternatives, this could quickly help reduce evasion and help MTPD resources be used more effectively.

Rini Sampath: Welcome, everyone, to Capital Commonsense. This is our first-ever podcast. I’m Rini Sampath. Earlier this year, I ran for mayor of Washington, DC, with a very simple message: fix the basics. That work continues through my writing and conversations. Greg Jaczko has spent his career working at the intersection of science and public policy, and he also ran for Congress here in DC.

In his recent piece for Capital Commonsense, he argues that DC could keep expanding solar while spending much less on the incentives that electricity customers help fund. I want to understand how those incentives work, who pays for them, and what changing them would mean for the people paying the bills. We’ll also get into the concern on the other side: if we reduce those payments, will fewer people install solar?

Greg, thank you for joining me. Before we get into the numbers, I really want to start from the beginning. Could you tell our listeners how solar went from a relatively unusual technology to something people install on their homes? And, especially for a total newbie like me, what made governments decide to help pay for it?

Subscribe now

Greg Jaczko: The advancement of solar is really one of the dramatically underreported revolutions of the last 20 years. I’m dating myself here, but I remember when I was growing up, it was a big deal when President Carter put a few solar panels on the roof of the White House. I think those were quickly taken down in the next administration.

It was a technology that always seemed possible, but for many reasons it was just too expensive to be a viable alternative to the other ways we generate electricity. During the Obama administration, there were a lot of federal subsidies, and that drove down the price of solar very significantly. You had a stimulus for companies, utilities, and homeowners to put these systems on their homes or in fields across the country. That further drove down prices, to the point where solar became the cheapest way we could generate electricity in the country.

A natural extension of that is to put it on your roof and have a little mini power plant, where you generate your own power and offset power you would otherwise get from the electricity grid.

In DC in particular, and in other places across the country, governments decided they wanted minimum amounts of electricity to come from renewable power. In a place like DC, they also added a special caveat: not only should we get more and more of our power from renewables, but a certain percentage of that should come from rooftops all across the District. That’s really what brings us to the solar market we have today and what we’re going to talk about.

How DC’s solar credits work

Rini Sampath: That’s a great setup. I’m especially intrigued by this credit system. When I first read your article, I wanted to understand who developed this idea of paying for solar. You talked about the Obama administration and the history of incentivizing folks. What problem were they initially hoping to solve? And can you tell me more about how DC adopted that approach and customized it for our city?

Greg Jaczko: The credits are often a confusing part of the energy generation process. The idea didn’t really come from the energy space. It comes from what’s referred to as a cap-and-trade process: a regulatory system where you impose some kind of limit on something, or in this case encourage something, and then set up a mechanism to keep track of the thing you’re trying to credit or limit.

In this case, it’s solar power generated from rooftops in the District. Mostly that’s homes, but it could also be businesses or some large warehouses. Any time somebody installs one of these systems and generates electricity, they earn a credit. That credit keeps track of how much electricity they generate from the rooftop system.

It’s a way to track how that electricity was generated. Whether it comes from a natural gas plant, a solar plant, or a wind farm, it all gets thrown into the electricity system, and you can’t really tell it apart. As states and other jurisdictions wanted to keep track of that, they needed to create these credits. That way, somebody in Pennsylvania isn’t taking credit for renewables produced in Ohio at the same time as somebody in New Jersey. That’s what this credit does: it gives you a way to keep track.

Rini Sampath: Interesting. Could you make this concrete for us and walk us through the process in DC for someone who’s totally new to this and hasn’t even entertained the idea of solar panels? Someone installs solar panels on their DC home. What happens to them financially? Who pays for the installation? And what does someone have to generate to earn one of those credits? I read in your article that Pepco doesn’t ultimately pay for these credits, so I want to understand where that cost goes.

Greg Jaczko: Let’s take another step back. These credits don’t just track how much solar is generated from a rooftop. They also feed into a compliance requirement that everyone who sells power in the District has. The District requires that, over time, a minimum amount of electricity has to come from rooftop solar. We established that policy as part of a clean energy and climate change program to make our electricity cleaner and greener.

That obligation falls to the power providers. Pepco is the one most people are familiar with. Pepco doesn’t generate those credits itself, because it isn’t allowed to own power plants, or rooftop systems, in the District. So it has to buy them from someone, and it buys them from a homeowner who owns a solar system.

The homeowner puts the system on their roof, and every time it generates a certain amount of electricity, it generates a credit equivalent to that amount. Pepco has to buy these up at the end of the year and turn in a certain number to show it’s meeting the minimum solar requirement. That’s where we get the marketplace for solar credits. The law works through a mechanism that essentially establishes what the price of those credits will be.

Why the program costs too much

Rini Sampath: Interesting. So now that listeners understand roughly how the system works, I can get into what you argue in your article: that local solar is a benefit to DC, but the current program costs way too much. What led you to look at whether DC pays more than necessary? And can you walk us through the homeowner example, so we can see what that looks like in reality?

Greg Jaczko: These renewable credits, or solar credits, are fairly common in the renewable industry. Part of my career I spent developing utility-scale solar projects, so these credits were always part of the process, and I was familiar with them.

Then, while you were running for mayor, I was running for the DC delegate position.

Rini Sampath: That’s right.

Greg Jaczko: And one of the things my wife kept complaining to me about was that our electricity bills just kept getting more and more expensive. “You’ve got to do something about that.” So I said, I’m going to make it part of my campaign. I started looking into the system and the process behind our electricity to figure out whether there were ways we could save money.

That’s when I delved into the program a bit more. Having worked on utility-scale solar, I was generally familiar with what these credits typically cost. I was somewhat surprised to learn that in DC they’re much higher than in other jurisdictions. So I started to pull the thread to understand exactly how high they were, and why.

In principle, the why is to give people an incentive to put a solar system on their roof, because doing that is good for the District. There’s a variety of reasons why that’s the case. Some of it has to do with the fact that we have to buy.

Rini Sampath: And this is me really trying to translate for folks what these savings mean: you estimate that cutting the credit payments in half could save DC electricity customers more than $75 million annually. That’s a huge number. It could pay for a lot of things.

Greg Jaczko: Yes. The power companies have to report every year to the Public Service Commission and the District government how much they’re paying to buy these credits. And this is an important part of the story that often gets forgotten.

In the last year, we spent about $155 million buying these renewable credits. What often gets lost is that although Pepco has to buy them, Pepco then turns around and charges all the customers in the District whatever it paid for those credits.

So whatever Pepco pays goes right back onto everyone’s electricity bill, and it gets buried there. It doesn’t show up as a line item. On your Pepco bill, there’s what’s called the supply charge: the cost Pepco has to pay to get you electricity supply. That’s where the cost of these credits sits. For an individual household, it’s certainly not the largest part of the bill, but it’s a measurable part. When everything else is going up, this is one way to start saving money: anywhere from $10 a month, maybe more, depending on your electricity usage.

So I kept pulling the thread. My general assumption has always been that solar is a cheap way to generate electricity. That raises the question: why do we even need to pay this credit to incentivize it? My analysis looks at exactly that.

When you buy a solar system, it’s not free. But what you pay for it is essentially the cost of your electricity. If a typical solar system lasts you 25 good years, the cost of electricity from that system is whatever you paid, spread out over those 25 years. That gives you an equivalent cost of electricity. What my analysis shows is that the cost of electricity from your solar system is, in almost all cases, cheaper than what you’d pay if you bought power from the grid through Pepco.

Rini Sampath: Interesting. Okay.

Greg Jaczko: So you’re already saving money, breaking even, or coming in right around the same cost with a solar system. You don’t need a large incentive.

If you’re not familiar with these numbers, it can be hard to follow, but here’s the way to think about it. When Pepco buys a credit and charges us back for it, we’re paying about two times the cost of grid electricity. That means we’re giving people who have solar systems a huge subsidy. We’re paying them twice what they’d pay for electricity, just to build the systems. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s unnecessary, certainly at that price. Maybe at a much lower price.

In terms of numbers, we’re talking about 40 cents a kilowatt-hour. A homeowner’s retail electricity rate is about 20-some cents a kilowatt-hour. So to offset that Pepco expense, we’re paying a homeowner 40 cents a kilowatt-hour, which, as I said, is completely unnecessary.

Right now that amounts to about $155 million a year. And it’s going to go up, because the required amount of rooftop solar in the District rises over time, eventually reaching 15%. So what we pay for these credits will grow every year.

The concern from solar supporters

Rini Sampath: Fascinating. You’ve already taught me so much about this subject, so thank you. I do want to give the opposing argument a fair hearing. I’m on board; I think this is a spectacular idea. But I was also looking at some of the reactions to the article on X, which of course has a field day with anything that’s published. So here’s a concern from solar supporters: these credits help families recover their investments sooner. Your analysis shows solar can save money over 25 years, but homeowners still have to make the payments now. What gives you confidence that cutting the incentive won’t put people off installing panels? I’d love to hear that, and I’m sure our listeners would too.

Greg Jaczko: My starting idea is that you have to make sure a solar system, on average, is cheaper than what you’d pay for grid electricity, because that’s the incentive. Solar has all kinds of other benefits for people, and for our electricity system in the District overall, but I don’t even monetize those benefits. I’m just looking directly at a system.

If you have the resources, say $25,000 available to just buy a solar system, you’re in a really good position. From day one, you’re assuming the system covers your total electricity use, so you’re not paying an electricity bill anymore. You pay a little bit, and I account for that in the analysis. If you’ve got the cash up front, that saves you money instantly. And as electricity prices go up, the savings get better and better. On average, electricity prices are likely to rise every year for the next 20 to 25 years. In fact, they’ll probably rise a lot more than a few percent, but I made a very conservative assumption in the analysis.

It gets more complicated if you don’t have $25,000 sitting around and need to borrow to pay for the system. Then, instead of paying Pepco your electricity bill every month, you’re paying off the loan you took out to buy the system. So the question becomes: how does that loan payment compare to what you’d pay for electricity?

With today’s power prices and system costs, in the first couple of years your monthly loan payment might be a little more than what you’d pay Pepco for electricity. Over time, you pay off the loan, and then you’re like the person who had the $25,000: you’re essentially getting your electricity without any monthly charge, because you already paid for it when you bought the system.

So you can make an argument that if you really want people to buy these systems, you can’t just tell them their monthly electricity costs will go down in 15 years. You want to be able to say, from day one, you won’t pay more than you would buying electricity from Pepco. That’s where you might need a bit of a credit.

I looked at those scenarios and made some very conservative assumptions. With those assumptions, you might need a credit of around 10 cents a kilowatt-hour for the first couple of years. But that very quickly drops to only a few cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with the close to 40 cents a kilowatt-hour subsidy we’re paying today. So you can still argue that you need something, but it’s nowhere close to what we’re currently paying for these credits.

Community solar

Rini Sampath: Interesting. That’s exactly where my head was at in terms of lifetime savings, and that explains it. One more follow-up. Your example looks at a homeowner buying panels. Would the same cuts work for community solar projects that help renters and lower-income households? Can you tell us a bit about the history there and how your proposal applies? Is there a world in which community solar is affected by a proposal like this?

Greg Jaczko: In the District, we don’t have a lot of space to build power plants, so solar is the thing we can do. We can do it on rooftops, or we can do small community solar projects, many of which are actually on rooftops or in large industrial areas.

These credits also apply to that locally generated solar, so this would affect those projects as well. But keep in mind that a community solar project is even more cost-efficient than a rooftop system. You’re in an even better position to save on electricity with a community solar project than with a rooftop system. So there’s even less need for a large credit, because those systems are cheaper to build overall. They have bigger economies of scale and are just more efficient.

So again, it’s an over-incentive that’s costing all of us money. The thing that’s so important in this whole analysis is that it’s not Pepco or any of the power companies paying for this credit. It’s all of us as DC electricity customers.

If you’re a low-income or middle-income person, you’re paying more on your bill to over-subsidize these other projects. That’s not to say we shouldn’t build them. We absolutely should. But the goal isn’t for that power to be free. It should be cost-competitive with what we’d pay for electricity overall, because right now we’re overpaying for these solar systems to be built. That cost gets spread out to everybody in the District. If you’re a business owner paying higher utility bills, you’re paying for those overly expensive solar systems. That’s where we need to right-size the program.

Making the change work

Rini Sampath: That’s really helpful. Along the same lines, I’d love to know how we make this change work. How would you reduce these payments while keeping solar attractive to people considering installation? And I’m also curious how the change would affect people who’ve already financed their panels. That’s getting into the weeds, but I’m sure there are listeners who financed their panels and are wondering how this reform affects them. So, a two-pronged question.

Greg Jaczko: The first thing you’d do is set up a new system going forward for new installations, with a different credit rate structure than current systems have. That’s an easy thing to do. There will be a period when solar installers and others say, “We can’t sell these systems.” But you certainly can, because these systems are still going to be cheaper. You just need a much, much smaller credit, anywhere from four to ten times smaller. That dramatically reduces our obligation to pay for these credits.

For existing system owners, it’s harder, no doubt about it. It would be politically unpopular. But keep in mind that we’re only talking about a small percentage of the electricity in the city. It’s not as if 60% of our electricity comes from these systems. And although this is being phased out, some of these payments actually go to people who live in Maryland. Not all of them go to people in the District. In some cases, we’re paying rooftops in Maryland this really high credit, so that money is leaving the District to begin with.

What you’d have to do is create a new credit for the future, as I said. Then, for existing credit holders, you phase out the high credit payment after five, six, or seven years. If you’ve had a system for five to seven years, you’ve more than paid it off already, and you really don’t need the credit at all.

It’s certainly a nice payment if you’re able to get it. But ultimately I think we have to bite the bullet and stop making it, because for many people in the District it’s truly just a revenue-generating source. When power prices are pressuring everyone, I think that’s a change we have to make. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or politically popular, but it’s the most straightforward way to do it.

If you’ve had those credits for more than five years, you simply phase them out and quickly drop the price down to the new credit rate, which would probably be somewhere closer to 4 cents a kilowatt-hour, or maybe up to 10 cents, but not 40 cents. Nobody needs a 40-cent-per-kilowatt-hour solar credit to make their system financially viable.

A pitch to the incoming mayor

Rini Sampath: That’s helpful. And obviously we’re at a time of change. Our presumptive mayor, Janeese Lewis George, is coming in very soon. In your article you make the case for this particular issue, but if you had the chance to make a direct pitch, are there one or two other things you’d want her incoming administration to focus on when it comes to solar and sustainability?

Greg Jaczko: I think we really have to look at electricity prices in the District. Prices here have grown faster than almost anywhere else in the country, and that’s exacerbating what’s already a cost-of-living crisis for people here. There are many things that could be done, and reforming this solar credit program is one that could bring prices down, or at least stabilize them, and make electricity more affordable for everyone in the District.

I do believe climate change is a real issue. We can’t ignore it, and we need to do our part here in the District. But I think we can achieve the same goals in a much, much cheaper way that will have a material impact on people’s electricity bills. The solar credits are an easy place to start. There’s growing recognition that this program is just too expensive, and that we can achieve the same goals at a much lower cost. I think that momentum is starting to build, and hopefully it’ll show up in the policies of the new mayor and the new council as they look for ways to make the District a more affordable and livable place.

There are other things we can do, too. We need to look at Pepco and our utility structure and see whether there are reforms that could rein in some of the costs. We also need to be more aggressive about our regional power pool. We’re part of a big power pool with a lot of data centers, and that’s driving up our costs. We have to make sure we’re not subsidizing electricity for projects that don’t have a direct benefit to the District.

But I think the solar credit is an easy one to start with. We can make a meaningful difference in people’s electricity bills without giving up on our climate and sustainability goals. We do want more local solar because, as I said, it insulates us a bit from the broader power pool, where prices are going up really fast. The more we can generate here in DC, the better our future will be. I just think we can do it at a much lower price than we’re paying right now.

Rini Sampath: That’s huge. Thank you, Greg. Before we wrap up, since we have about one more minute, I want our listeners to get to know the person behind this piece. At Capital Commonsense, we’re very lucky to have several talented full-time professionals in various fields who moonlight as contributors to our Substack, which is run by Ashley Schapitl. Greg has so generously offered his time, both writing this piece and joining us today. So, Greg, back to you: tell us a little about yourself.

Greg Jaczko: As a kid, I was always inspired by the night sky. One of the things I lament today is that my kids don’t get to see the night sky the way I did growing up. I grew up outside of Albany, in upstate New York. I became enamored with science and wanted to pursue it as my profession, so I went to graduate school and got a doctorate in physics.

As I was doing that, I became more aware of the significant public policy challenges the US faced, and I wanted to devote more of my expertise to them. I was very fortunate to get a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It took people like me, with advanced degrees in science, and plopped them down in Washington to help make the policy process a little more “scientified,” if I can coin a new term.

I worked for a congressman from Massachusetts as a fellow, then was fortunate to work for Nevada Senator Harry Reid on a number of science policy and energy issues, and then went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I can say without a doubt that I’m a big believer in public service. Today I run a fellowship program at Princeton University that helps get students into government, because I believe so much in public policy.

As I tell people, when I was chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it was a very challenging and exciting job. I never woke up without knowing why I was going to work: to help the American people and keep people safe. That’s a feeling I simply haven’t been able to replace in anything I’ve done since leaving government.

It was a tremendous honor and privilege to work in government on behalf of the American people. I don’t think there’s anything better you can do with your life than to be, at least in some part, involved in government, engaging in public policy and helping improve the nation we all share. So I applaud you, too, for running, because running for office is one of the ways you can do that. It’s not easy, and it’s very challenging, but it’s so important to have people doing it. It was a great experience for me when I did it as well.

Rini Sampath: Absolutely. Same to you, Greg. I have so much respect for you and your public service. Thank you again for joining us and walking us through all of this. To our listeners, you can read Greg’s full piece at Capital Commonsense; we’ll include the link with this episode. Thanks, everyone.

Greg Jaczko: Thank you.

Subscribe now

Figure 1: Electricity Use and Prices in DC1

DC’s Limited Options

Policy and market factors determine much of these increases. The market factors are challenging for local government to control. Rooftop solar and community solar offer a vital hedge for DC electricity customers. These systems reduce the need to receive increasingly expensive power from PJM. They reduce impacts on local transmission and distributionassets and increase overall system reliability. Most importantly, DC can control the impact of these systems on electricity prices.

Figure 2: DC Power Sources2

Local Solar Market

Our energy policy requires a specific amount of local solar as part of a broader renewable energy mandate. To ensure compliance and provide a subsidy, electricity generated from local solar bestows a credit, called a solar renewable energy credit (SREC), on system owners. Electricity providers, like Pepco, the primary source for most homeowners, or other retail providers, must purchase these SRECs to match the percentage of the power they sell that the renewable energy standard requires. That percentage will increase to 15% by 2041 and stands at 4.3% today. DC law sets the price of a credit through a complex mechanism involving market dynamics and price maximums. Currently, the price of a solar credit is about 37 cents/kWh but has been as high as 43.5 cents/kWh since 2023, meaning District residents pay solar owners 1.5 to 2 times the retail price of grid electricity. This price is artificially established by the maximum price in DC law.

Figure 3: REC Costs for All Sources3

It is about seven times higher than comparable credits in Maryland, more than 10 times higher than in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and far higher than renewable energy credits for grid renewable resources like wind and solar farms.

Figure 4: Solar REC Costs4

Here’s the problem. Pepco does not ultimately pay for these credits. It charges this cost back to all of its DC customers. Other retail providers similarly pass through the compliance cost. In 2025, DC power customers paid other DC homeowners, community solar facilities, and even some Maryland solar owners about $155 million to comply with DC’s local solar carveout through the purchase of SRECs. This subsidy is unnecessary.

Until recently, solar has been among the cheapest new generating options for most of the country. Although more expensive than large, utility-scale solar installations, rooftop solar systems have generally been good choices. The calculus has become more difficult in the last year because federal subsidies for individual rooftop solar systems ended, and Trump Administration tariffs have imposed additional costs on most solar systems. Nonetheless, the technology is still largely cheaper than current retail electricity prices, which is the cost a customer would pay for electricity without a rooftop solar system.

This is the key measure for determining whether solar makes sense for most homeowners. Will you save money? In the District, in almost all cases, a solar system provides cost savings without any SREC subsidies.

Consider the cost of electricity from a rooftop solar system to a homeowner for two scenarios: an outright purchase and a purchase financed through a home equity loan. I assess the equivalent electricity price for a system in 2022 and today over a conservative 25-year lifespan. Figure 5 shows the equivalent cost of the electricity the local solar system produces for a homeowner. This calculation assumes no SREC payments. The system is 8 kW and produces roughly 9,800 kWh a year, all of which the household uses. The cost includes an inverter replacement, annual maintenance, and a 10% share of the bill (fixed charges) that solar cannot avoid. The 2022 system includes the 30% federal tax credit available at that time.

Figure 5: Rooftop Solar Cost Comparison5

Comparing this figure to the avoidable price of retail electricity shows that solar systems are beneficial in the long run in all cases. The equivalent price for power from an outright purchase of a system shows immediate cost savings for systems installed in 2022 and today. A system financed through a home equity loan, assumed at 7.5% over 15 years today, would be more expensive in the early years but would eventually show benefit as the loan is paid. Even in 2022, a loan-financed system at 5.4% would have shown savings by the fourth year.

In other words, the cost of the loan to pay for the system would be less than what a homeowner would pay for the electricity their solar system replaces over the life of the system. The savings increase if one assumes prices increase 4% a year on average. Considering present value, seven of the eight systems considered show savings, as shown in Table 1. The exception, a loan-financed system today with prices rising 2% a year, roughly breaks even.

Table 1: Present Value of Solar Compared With Grid Electricity 6

SREC Level Unnecessary

This analysis shows that the benefits of rooftop solar exist without any SREC subsidies, assuming a modest inflationary increase in electricity prices. Adding the SREC subsidy at the current level on top of the inherent benefit is an unnecessary redistribution of costs from all DC electricity customers to a small percentage of homeowners and businesses in the District. In the one case where solar costs more than grid electricity, the difference is less than a cent per kWh, not tens of cents per kWh, which is the value of the current SRECs. In the worst case, a loan-financed system installed today, a SREC of approximately 10 cents/kWh would be needed at first, declining to about 6 cents/kWh over the 15-year loan, for the system owner to be cash flow positive each year.

In other words, DC SRECs are too high by a factor of 4 to 10. Reducing SRECs by even one half would immediately save DC customers over $75 million. Reducing the credit by a factor of 10 would save over $135 million. Savings would increase over time, because the solar mandate requires even more solar while the maximum price of the credit decreases only slowly.

Local solar is a benefit to DC, but the current program costs too much. Simply reducing the SREC by half, or ideally by a factor of ten, would keep solar systems a viable replacement for expensive grid power and reduce an unnecessary cost on all DC power users. Correcting the SREC price would provide immediate savings to DC electricity customers and still offer a viable alternative to ever-increasing retail power prices.

Following up on the arguments recently made in Capital Commonsense by Ashley Schapitl, this article provides further evidence that the DCHA payment standard is unusually high: Voucher recipients can rent apartments in or near the top decile of all apartments in the city, and the District’s payment standard is higher than that in other high-cost cities despite having substantially lower market rents. Adopting lower, neighborhood-specific payment standards akin to the approach of some other cities could generate monthly savings of up to about $1,700 to $3,000 per family renting an apartment at the current payment standard, enough to offer a new voucher to a family on the waitlist. In addition to assisting more families, this reform would preserve the ability of families with vouchers to access costlier neighborhoods while also mitigating landlord abuse of the program.

How the payment standard works

As background, the federal government provides a fixed pot of money each year for DCHA to operate the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. Recipient families must pay 30% of their adjusted income toward the rent of approved private market apartments, and DCHA uses the federal funds to cover the remaining portion. While federal law dictates the key parameters of the program, DCHA retains discretion over the payment standard.

The payment standard is the maximum qualifying gross rent (contract rent plus utilities) for which a family is eligible to rent an apartment with a given number of bedrooms. A family with a voucher that rents an approved housing unit for which the rent is no higher than the payment standard is required to contribute 30% of its adjusted income toward the rent and DCHA covers the rest. Families are allowed to lease an apartment whose rent exceeds the payment standard, but in that case, the family must cover the entire difference between the rent and the payment standard, on top of what they already owe based on 30% of their income. At initial occupancy in an apartment, families cannot owe more than 40% of their income for the rent.

DCHA’s choice of a payment standard is subject to certain federal constraints. First, the payment standard typically must be between 90% and 110% of Fair Market Rent (FMR), calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as the 40^th percentile of rents paid by recent movers for standard-quality units in the local area. Second, DCHA can set a uniform citywide payment standard, or it can allow the payment standard to vary across zip codes, based on Small Area FMRs.

The DCHA payment standard

DCHA has decided to set a uniform payment standard covering the entire city. Using flexibility offered by HUD under the Moving to Work demonstration program, the District has received permission from HUD to set the uniform payment standard at 187% of the FMR. That is 87% higher than the 40^th percentile of rents in the DC metropolitan area, or between 70% and 108% higher than the typical payment standard range.

A recent plan by DCHA would set payment standards that vary by zip code, equal to 168% of its Small Area FMR. The result would be lower payment standards in some areas and higher payment standards in others.

The figure below1 reports the District’s existing payment standard by number of bedrooms. It also reports the percentile of the payment standard in the distribution of gross monthly rent among all rental units in the District. I pool three years of the American Community Survey (ACS), 2022-2024, to estimate the distribution of gross rent by number of bedrooms in the District. As nominal rents have been stable in the District in recent years, this should approximate the current distribution. According to estimates from Apartment List, the median rent in FY2026 was $2,121, slightly lower than the 2022-2024 average of $2,155.

The District’s existing payment standard by number of bedrooms.

Source: https://www.dchousing.org/wordpress/vouchers/payment-standard/; American Community Survey, 2022-2024; Author’s calculations

DCHA’s payment standard allows families with vouchers to rent apartments that are more expensive than the vast majority of apartments in the city. For example, a family renting a three-bedroom apartment at the payment standard of $5,301 would have a higher rent than 93% of all of the District’s three-bedroom apartments. Across apartment sizes, a family is enabled by DCHA to rent an apartment that is within or near the top decile of apartments in the city.

Payment standards of this magnitude are out of step with the rest of the country, including some of the highest-cost cities. Our second figure below2 reports for select cities how the payment standard compares with the distribution of zip code level FMRs. The District’s payment standard for a three-bedroom apartment ($5,301) exceeds that in San Francisco ($5,064), New York ($3,753), and Seattle ($3,297), even though rents are higher in all three of those cities than in the District. The payment standard in Boston and Los Angeles varies across zip codes. The District’s payment standard exceeds the payment standard of every zip code in Los Angeles and all but a handful of zip codes in Boston, even though rents are again higher in both cities.

Payment standard and small area fair market rent for three-bedroom units, by city, 2026

Source: Small area FMRs from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Small Area FMRs; Payment standards from District of Columbia Housing Authority, Housing Authority of the City and County of San Francisco, New York City Housing Authority, Seattle Housing Authority, Boston Housing Authority, Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles

The District’s payment standard is more than $1,000 higher than the FMR in its most expensive zip code. In San Francisco, New York, and Seattle, the payment standard is well within the range of zip-code level FMRs, toward the lower end in New York and Seattle. The ranges of payment standards in Boston and Los Angeles mirror relatively closely the ranges of zip-code level FMRs in the two cities. The District is clearly an outlier.

Rationale for a high payment standard

In theory, a high payment standard enables greater tenant flexibility in selecting an apartment, by expanding the inventory of apartments that could potentially be approved. It also makes it possible for relatively low-income voucher recipients to seek apartments in higher cost areas that might have lower crime, higher quality schools, and closer proximity to public transportation options.

Drawbacks of a high payment standard

However, these potential advantages are outweighed by the drawbacks of DCHA’s payment standard. It reduces the number of families who receive assistance and enables landlord abuse of the program. Furthermore, affording low-income families the chance to access costlier neighborhoods with vouchers can be accomplished in cheaper and more effective ways.

Fewer families get assistance

The most direct drawback of DCHA’s unusually high payment standard is that it reduces the number of families who can receive housing assistance. Once the District’s fixed pot of federal funds for the Housing Choice Voucher program is used up, other eligible families are turned away. Nationwide, it is estimated that only one in four families eligible for housing assistance actually receives it. In the District, the waitlist is closed.

It is hard to justify the proposition that one low-income family should be allowed to use a voucher to rent an apartment for over $5,000 per month when another low-income family can’t even get on the waiting list. It is even harder to justify when recognizing that, nationally, the average family with a non-disabled working age adult retains a voucher for over 15 years, as shown in recent research by Howard Husock and Bruce Meyer. A family in the District with little to no adjusted income could conceivably receive near a million dollars in housing assistance over their entire housing assistance spell at the same time that another very low-income family gets zero.

The District does not have the power to turn the Housing Choice Voucher program into an entitlement program that provides assistance to all eligible families. But it could allow more families to receive assistance and reduce the extent of inequality in the program by bringing the payment standard more in line with market rents.

Encourages landlord abuse

A high payment standard encourages landlord abuse because it allows landlords to take in more revenue than they could obtain by renting out their units to families without vouchers. The potential for abuse is high. The $5,301 payment standard for a three-bedroom unit ranges from 1.2 to 2.8 times as high as the small area FMRs in zip codes throughout the District. In the lowest-cost zip code (20018), a landlord could charge as much as $3,421 above the $1,880 small area FMR without exceeding the payment standard.

Voucher-recipient families themselves have a weaker incentive than other families to avoid apartments with inflated rents, because their share of the rent is fixed at 30% of their income regardless of the rent. That is, a higher rent costs them nothing.

Absent countermeasures, families’ only incentive for avoiding apartments with inflated rents is the possibility of finding a more desirable apartment whose quality is more in line with the rent being asked. But because the District’s payment standard is so high, this incentive is less powerful. A family that qualifies for a three-bedroom apartment would be just as happy with an apartment renting for $3,300 as one renting for $5,300 if they are the same quality. They might even prefer applying for the $5,300 apartment since they are unlikely to face competition from unassisted renters for an apartment with such an inflated rent. Or a landlord could potentially offer kickbacks to voucher holders willing to lease out these units. If the payment standard were lower, there would be less room for landlords to inflate the rent on a decent quality apartment that voucher families would find acceptable.

The potential for abuse by landlords who attract voucher holders despite inflated rents is the rationale for the District’s rent-reasonableness evaluations. When a landlord accepts an application from a family with a voucher, DCHA must judge whether the rent is reasonable before the lease can be signed.

While a rent-reasonableness review is a prudent step, and required by federal law, it is not a full substitute for lowering the payment standard. A review might miss aspects of an apartment that affect the market price but are difficult to assess without a comprehensive or potentially in-person evaluation. And because the vouchers are fully funded by the federal government, the District has a weaker incentive to get the review right than if it paid for vouchers with local funds. The District’s main incentives for accuracy are to avoid federal audits, and potentially, to ensure more funds remain available to assist additional families.

While an alternative to reducing the payment standard would be to increase the intensity of reviews, that approach comes with other costs, including lengthening the process before a family is allowed to sign a lease. That can make it harder for voucher families to attain competitively priced apartments where non-voucher recipients face no delay in signing a lease once the landlord approves their application. In fact, apartments with the most competitive rents may be the most difficult for voucher holders to attain because non-voucher families are more likely to scoop them up before the rent reasonableness review can be completed.

A lower payment standard would not eliminate the need for rent reasonableness reviews, but it would reduce the stakes for getting it right. In addition, families themselves would have a more powerful incentive to avoid apartments with inflated rents.

The key is to strike the right balance: The payment standard should not be set below the level where voucher families can find a decent quality apartment, but it also should not be set too much higher.

A better way to help families access higher cost neighborhoods

A potential objection to reducing the payment standard is that families with vouchers may be unable to access neighborhoods where market rents exceed the payment standard. One response to this objection would point to the unfairness of enabling some families to access high-cost neighborhoods at the expense of other families not receiving any assistance at all. Still, there are other rationales for enabling low-income families to access decent quality housing in more costly neighborhoods, including promoting racial and socioeconomic integration and seeking to improve the trajectories of low-income children who can benefit from higher quality schools and safer neighborhoods.

However, a more effective way to enable voucher families to access higher-cost neighborhoods is to vary the payment standard according to the FMR in each zip code, an authority cities already have and some exercise (including Boston and Los Angeles, as shown in the second figure). So-called “small-area FMRs” are already published by zip code, including for the District, as reported in the map3 below. Research by Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong shows that while a uniformly high payment standard increases rents without meaningfully improving apartment or neighborhood quality, pegging the payment standard to small area FMRs leads voucher holders to move to higher quality neighborhoods.

Small Area Fair Market Rent for Three-Bedroom Apartment, by Zip Code, District of Columbia, FY2026

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Small Area FMRs; American Community Survey 2020-2024

DCHA could peg the payment standard in each zip code to 110% of the small area FMRs shown in the map. The highest payment standard for a three-bedroom unit would be $4,675 in the Capitol Hill area (20003) and close-in northwest neighborhoods (20009), and the lowest would be $2,068 in some of the northeast neighborhoods (20018). These payment standards would be between 39% and 88% of the current $5,301 citywide payment standard, representing a major reduction in most areas.

How much could lower neighborhood-specific payment standards help?

Suppose the District decided to adopt neighborhood-specific payment standards pegged to 110% of small area FMRs. How much money could be saved and how many additional families could be served?

In the case of a family currently renting an apartment at or above the current payment standard, the government savings would be equal to the difference between the current payment standard and 110% of the small area fair market rent. For a three-bedroom apartment, the savings under the new policy would be $2,529 in the average zip code (with zip codes weighted based on their share of existing voucher holders). The number of new families that could be served using the savings would depend on the new families’ contribution to their rent based on their adjusted income, as well as the rent of the apartments they lease. Assuming new families contribute $395, the average monthly household contribution in 2025 in the District among voucher-recipient families, and that they rent apartments at the new payment standard, an additional 1.06 families could be served.

The figure below4 reports the savings and additional families served for each number of bedrooms. Across all apartment sizes, an additional 1.04 to 1.15 families could receive assistance for every family renting an apartment at the current payment standard. In other words, in the average zip code each voucher currently being used to rent an apartment at the payment standard could instead serve two families if the payment standard were reduced to 110% of the small area FMR.

Savings and additional families served for each number of bedrooms.

Source: https://www.dchousing.org/wordpress/vouchers/payment-standard/; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Small Area Fair Market Rents, and Picture of Subsidized Households; Author’s calculations

Of course, because the rents of voucher-recipient families are not all at or above the current payment standard, the savings for some families would be less than those reported in Figure 4, and the number of families assisted across the city would not double.

I am unaware of publicly available data on the distribution of rents, by zip code and number of bedrooms, for voucher holders in the District. However, in responses for an oversight hearing last year, DCHA reported average contract rents by zip code ranging from $1,995 in the lowest rent zip code to $3,750 in the highest in FY2025. These average rents (before including utilities) would be higher than 110% of the small area FMR for a two-bedroom unit in 15 out of the 22 reported zip codes, a potentially illuminating comparison given that 72% of voucher-leased units in the District have two bedrooms or less. While inference is difficult without the full distribution of rents by number of bedrooms, it is suggestive that a significant number of apartments may have gross rents above 110% of the small area FMR, and reducing the payment standard could significantly increase the number of families who receive vouchers.

A call to action

Adopting lower, neighborhood-specific payment standards pegged at 110% of small area FMRs would put the District in line with other high-cost cities, instead of being an outlier with a payment standard that far exceeds the FMR in even its costliest zip codes. The policy would directly benefit eligible families who are stuck on the waitlist or can’t even get onto it, by freeing up funds to serve more families. It could also make the voucher program more efficient by placing a safeguard on landlords charging far more than the market rent, which would have the additional benefit of making any efficiency improvements to the rent-reasonableness evaluation less risky.

In its most recent plan for updating the District’s payment standards, DCHA called for pegging them to 168% of small area FMRs by zip code. While adopting zip code-specific payment standards would be a welcome change, the already unusually high payment standard would increase even more in some neighborhoods. For example, a family would be able to rent a three-bedroom apartment for up to $7,140 in the Capitol Hill neighborhood (zip code 20003). This would be around $2,000 higher than the payment standard in the most expensive zip codes in Boston and Los Angeles, as well as the payment standard that applies citywide in San Francisco.

Making an unusually high payment standard even more unusually high is not a sensible reform. The District should instead prioritize helping more families access vouchers and curtailing landlord abuse of the program by adopting more reasonable, that is, substantially lower, payment standards.

Subscribe now

Matthew Yglesias: Council members struck me as appealingly engaged with the question they chose to ask — what are options to increase the District’s tax revenue per person — but disturbingly incurious as to why they find themselves asking this question. The basic cause of the budget gap is not DOGE and certainly not a past failure to try to come up with ways to raise taxes, it’s an astronomical increase in inflation-adjusted per capita spending since Fiscal Year 2018. This is not so much because the Council undertook huge new spending initiatives as that the previously robust population growth trend turned sharply negative in 2020. Despite some bounceback from post-pandemic lows, we still have fewer people than we had in 2019 and are not within a light year of our earlier trend. Since the District is already a relatively high tax jurisdiction, there is simply no way to make this work without either a major curtailment of spending or a new population growth boom.

The population crash is the root cause of the fiscal crisis and the main lens through which the Council should evaluate every question is “does this make D.C. a more or less attractive place to live for middle class taxpayers?” DC is a progressive city with progressive values and a progressive council that rightly cares about the fate of the most marginalized. But they tell parents that in the event of a loss of cabin pressure you need to put your own oxygen mask on first, not because you’re selfish but because that’s the best way to make sure you can take care of your kids. The foundation of everything high-minded the Council has done in the 21st century rests on the fact that for 15 years, more and more people wanted to move here. That boom ended midway through Mayor Bowser’s second term and the city simply hasn’t made a serious effort to address it.

Subscribe now

Stan Veuger: One big-picture takeaway from the hearing is that our tax rates are already so high, even our Council doesn’t seem to want to raise the rates on existing taxes. It could just raise the property tax rate, or the income tax rate, or the franchise tax rate, or the sales tax rate, but it appears uninterested in those options.

Instead it is looking to layer various quirky new taxes (a land value tax, a capital income tax, a business activity tax) that other states and localities generally don’t use, on top of the existing system. These new taxes will of course effectively raise rates on work and investment, but they will do so more furtively.

In addition to the usual distortions these new taxes would generate, especially of location choice, investment, and entrepreneurship, they would make an already complex system even harder to navigate. They also come with legal risk, especially the proposed business activity tax, which strikes me as hard to square with both the Home Rule Act and the dormant Commerce Clause. It would be a disaster to introduce that tax with all the distortions it would create and then have to refund the revenue years from now after losing a lawsuit, as happened when local governments in Maryland had to refund $200 million after Comptroller v. Wynne.

If the Council really wants to increase tax revenue instead of bringing spending under control, it should look at base broadeners. Obvious options there include extending the sales tax to services and scaling back the property tax relief wealthy seniors receive. We could also generate significant additional revenue from enforcement of traffic and solid waste disposal rules, which would have the added benefits of increasing traffic safety and reducing the rat population.

Rini Sampath: During today’s Council hearing on taxes, veteran DC journalist Tom Sherwood wrote on Twitter: “Let me know when anyone proposes ways to ‘control spending.’” That’s where I stand. I want DC to become a world-class city that fulfills our democratic commitment to a just and equitable society. But the direction of our city gives me little confidence that this government will responsibly manage additional public dollars.

Now is not the time to ask residents to pay more to compensate for the Bowser administration’s failures and Council’s budget mismanagement. As liberals, we care deeply about affordable housing, child care, health care, and a strong social safety net. We should demand that those services reach the people who need them. The same DC Fiscal Policy Institute now advocating higher taxes reported in March 2025 that people waited an average of 380 days between matching with a housing voucher and signing a lease. It urged officials to process 750 pending supportive housing applications. DCFPI rightly called for fixing those delays. I disagree with pursuing higher taxes before officials demonstrate progress on the failures already documented. A separate 2023 analysis estimated that the DC Housing Authority overpaid landlords by $12 million annually. Residents deserve to know what government has corrected, what savings it has identified, and why additional revenue would produce better results.

We also need to take business owners seriously. Several have told me they would prefer to open in Maryland or Virginia because they expect fewer regulatory hurdles and lower tax burdens. Their accounts don’t establish the effects of every tax proposal, but Council should investigate what drives those decisions. DC already has the country’s highest first-year business failure rate: 32.9%, compared with 22.1% nationally, according to LendingTree’s 2026 analysis. The DC Policy Center also reported that the District lost 44,600 jobs between January 2025 and April 2026. Those losses reflect several pressures, including federal cuts, but they make retaining and attracting employers more urgent. Policies we support nationally still need scrutiny when applied to a city where businesses can choose locations just across the border.

Our next mayor should recover improper payments, renegotiate overpriced contracts, fix permitting delays, and publish a savings plan alongside a plan to expand the tax base. Savings may not close the entire deficit. But before considering higher taxes, I want evidence that government can responsibly manage what we already contribute. Protecting the safety net requires an economy that can sustain it and a government that can deliver it. That’s common sense reform.

Chris Kennedy: Anyone interested in the future of DC should put today’s hearing on in the background while cooking dinner or going for a walk. It’s in the weeds, but you’ll get a real sense of the challenges facing the city. The witnesses held a range of views, but they broadly agreed on three things. DC faces a genuine fiscal dilemma. Much of it stems from forces outside local control. And the District has an obligation to model progressive governance, including a robust social safety net.

Where they diverged was on solutions, and on how the people and businesses that call DC home, or might, would respond to them. Will higher taxes on business and personal income trigger a mass exodus? Probably not. But studies finding little tax-driven migration mostly look at moves between states, and they don’t account for long-term business creation or population growth. Our income tax is exceptionally progressive and increasingly dependent on a small segment of our community. Residents earning $1 million or more file fewer than 1% of tax returns but pay roughly a quarter of all income tax, and the top 12% of filers account for about 2/3 of DC’s income tax. The real risk isn’t flight. It’s that we quietly lose those families and companies that are deciding where to put down roots or open a second office. Those decisions are crucial to our efforts to build an economy less dependent on the federal government.

And then there is spending, which I hope the council takes up in a future, similar hearing. Writers in this blog have and will continue to highlight areas where we believe there are opportunities to save money; address waste, fraud and abuse; and improve service delivery for District residents. This is not just about cutting costs; it’s about trust that our council is a sober steward of taxpayer money.

Ashley Schapitl: Having prepared for many congressional hearings in my day, I know they can be heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. For the most part, I thought this was a productive conversation between witnesses and council members at least if the goal was to discuss the merits of specific tax policies as opposed to our broader structural economic and fiscal challenges. That being said, I was struck by the rhetoric around income from wealth having an advantage over income from wages.

While this is true federally, it is NOT true in the District. At the District level, investment and wage income are generally taxed at the same rate. Add a 3% surtax, as is currently envisioned, and a top-bracket District filer would pay a 13.75% marginal rate to the District on a dollar of capital gains—more than they would pay on a dollar of wage income. The resulting top tax rate of 13.75% would be among the highest state or local rates on this kind of income anywhere in the country, edging past California’s 13.3% top rate and New York City’s 13.5% combined state and local rate for single filers earning $1.5 million.

If the Council wants to argue that’s the right policy on the merits, members are free to do so, but much of the hearing sounded more like a debate over whether capital gains and wage income should be taxed at the same rate federally, rather than a discussion of how they are already taxed in the District. We simply cannot solve all of the inequities in the federal tax code through the tax code of a mid-size city of ~700,000 people.

Malcom Fox: Today’s hearing was a preview of the same revenue and spending debates that will happen during the FY28 budget process. I had hoped the hearing would focus on using smart tax policy to address DC’s ongoing economic and fiscal crises as the District faces its worst economic outlook in 30 years: highest unemployment in the nation, commercial property at half its pre-COVID levels, and record restaurant closures. Instead, the word that came up most frequently and defined the hearing was “fairness.” Fairness should undeniably be baked into our tax code, but fairness is hard to measure, and no serious observer would argue it’s the only factor we should consider when designing tax reform.

Virtually every District resident agrees DC should have a fair and progressive tax system. Fortunately, DC has the most progressive tax code in the country and has some of the highest top bracket income tax rates. Despite our existing system, many Councilmembers and activists framed every tax proposal through the lens of fairness and ignored the potential consequences of tax flight, legal challenges, and higher costs passed onto residents. During one memorable interaction, Council Chair Phil Mendelson asked the Director of the Fair Budget Coalition, “ You say the rich should pay their fair share, and I agree, but what is their fair share?” Her answer: “They should just pay more.” I worry for DC’s future if tax policy is debated, and possibly implemented, based on vibes.

While not unexpected given her previous comments, this is deeply disappointing to me and raises real questions about Lewis George’s willingness to prioritize the safety and well being of Washingtonians and her seriousness about attracting new private-sector investment to innovate and grow our economy.1

What’s more, for a candidate who won her primary promising to make the District more affordable, blocking Waymo does not make Uber or Lyft less expensive.

Waymo, for its part, remains committed to launching in the District, sharing the following spokesperson statement: “Waymo will support safer roads, hundreds of new jobs, and expanded access to reliable transportation options for communities across the District. We are committed to working with District leaders to deliver those benefits.”

As we have covered in Capital Commonsense, the District has a traffic violence problem. Despite spending millions on traffic-calming infrastructure, dangerous driving in the District has grown dramatically in recent years. Dangerous drivers face few consequences, and the costs of traffic violence are disproportionately borne by the poorest communities in D.C.

Given the failures of Vision Zero and city leaders appearing increasingly resigned to dangerous drivers racing down our streets without consequences, I have been strongly supportive of Waymo officially launching in the District, particularly as a frequent pedestrian who does not drive.

The safety data Waymo has published is compelling: As of last month, Waymo had accumulated more than 270 million miles of autonomous driving. Waymo’s independently validated data shows a rate of serious-injury and fatal crashes 20 times lower than human drivers. To be sure, there are instances where things have gone wrong, but all available evidence points to Waymo being much safer than human drivers.

While I support Waymo for the safety benefits, I wanted to dig deeper into Lewis George’s claim that Waymo will cause “disruptions that put countless workers at risk” for those with legitimate concerns about jobs.

How many District residents are countless workers? The answer is not countless. Per Councilmember Lewis George—it’s 200 full-time workers. Waymo has met with and briefed councilmembers, including Councilmember Lewis George, in recent months. She shared that around 200 ride share drivers who are D.C. residents drive full-time-equivalent hours.

Many ride share drivers who drive in the District are residents of Maryland and Virginia, but Councilmember Lewis George is running to be the mayor of Washington, D.C., not the governor of Maryland or Virginia, and she should prioritize the safety of all Washingtonians.

Governor Wes Moore and Governor Abigail Spanberger do not prioritize jobs for Washingtonians ahead of the safety of their own residents, I assure you.

Legalizing Waymo passenger service would also create new jobs in the District through construction of depots and ongoing operations support required to run a 24/7 service. Waymo says it intends to invest in hundreds of good jobs as the service grows. These jobs would be more stable with predictable schedules and benefits like health care, unlike independent-contractor ride share jobs.

Councilmember Charles Allen, to his credit, has already negotiated concessions from Waymo, including a per-mile tax and resources for workers. Beyond the new jobs Waymo would create and the revenue and resources Councilmember Allen has negotiated, it’s worth noting that drivers continue to work for Uber and Lyft in cities where Waymo operates. As an experiment, while writing this I searched for how long it would take me to get an Uber from my favorite Austin restaurant—Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que—and the answer was one minute.

Capital Commonsense readers can support Councilmember Allen in his efforts to move this bill, and urge their councilmembers to support. I hope our incoming mayor changes her mind.

The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute writes that a BAT “would make business taxation fairer and more racially equitable while raising significant revenue for the District.” The D.C. Tax Revision Commission considered a plan to impose a 0.9% BAT (including a 0.5% rate on nonprofits) and use the revenue to reduce other business taxes, but ultimately did not produce a report of recommendations in large part due to opposition to the proposed tax.

No other state imposes a BAT, nor is the concept familiar even to tax experts. Its authors intend it, in part, to sidestep the Bishop court decision but downplay the legal risks of attempting to do so. If the BAT worked as designed, it would reduce other existing business taxes and leave little if any extra revenue for new programs, but some proponents cite it as just such a net revenue source. Whether or not the BAT is viable in the District of Columbia, policymakers should revisit D.C.’s uniquely confusing mix of business taxes.

Subscribe now

D.C. Already Has 5 Major Existing Taxes on Businesses

Despite rhetoric that D.C.-based businesses are undertaxed, they currently are responsible for paying five major existing taxes (with the amounts raised in FY 2024):

1. Corporate Franchise tax ($932 million).

This corporate income tax is a tax on profits (revenues minus deductible expenses) at a rate of 8.25%. 44 states have such a tax, with rates ranging from 2% to 11.5% and an average of 6.6%. Maryland has a similar tax also at 8.25%, as does Virginia but at a 6% rate.

2. Tangible personal property tax ($83 million).

At one time, all property was subject to the property tax, including household furnishings and business inventory. Assessors would enter homes and shops to make estimates of the value of what they saw, an intrusive process that gradually retreated to today’s property tax on real property and a remnant of tangible personal property tax mainly on business property.

This tax on business equipment and movable furnishings is imposed at a 3.4% rate on property exceeding $225,000 (amount set in 2008 and not adjusted for inflation). All businesses and nonprofits, even those with property below the threshold, are required by law to fill out the form and report their property. As a result, 60,000 businesses file but only 1,500 (or 2.5% of businesses) owe anything, and 91% of the collected tax comes from just 300 firms. The forms require all property to be sorted into 94 categories on one of 7 major depreciation schedules, many of which differ from federal depreciation tax treatment, and no asset can be depreciated below 25% of acquisition cost. 36 states, or localities within those states, have some form of TPP taxation. In all but Georgia and D.C., however, the exemption level operates as a threshold with businesses under it not required to file at all. Maryland exempts $20,000 of TPP and taxes it at lower rates (Montgomery County at 1.735%; Prince George’s County at 2.5%), while Virginia taxes TPP locally at varying rates (Alexandria at 0.533%; Arlington at 5%; Fairfax at 4.57%).

3. Unincorporated business franchise tax (UBT) ($200 million).

Most U.S. businesses are not organized as C corporations, but instead as sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies (LLCs), or S corporations. Most states do not directly tax these pass-through entities; instead, its owners or members pay individual income tax on their proportionate share of profits. (In recent years, most states, but not D.C., have adopted elective entity-level taxes on pass-through businesses to allow the business owners to avoid the federal cap on the state and local tax deduction. These taxes provide an offsetting credit against individual income tax, so do not increase state revenue.)

D.C.’s UBT dates to 1947, copying a New York law to collect tax from businesses that could organize as corporations but were not so as to avoid the corporate franchise tax. For this reason, except for a 1975 attempt cut short by the Bishop decision (more below), nonsalaried professionals that have historically (or are legally required to be) organized as partnerships or sole proprietorships such as accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, and real estate agents have been exempt from UBT. These business owners, if D.C. residents, instead pay individual income tax on their profits. Non-professional businesses pay the UBT but receive a dollar-for-dollar credit (until 2026, a deduction) against their income tax. The UBT therefore is somewhat of a vestige since Bishop, reaching no income that the individual income tax couldn’t already reach. Non-resident business owners are exempt per the Home Rule Act ban on taxing nonresident income, as applied by Bishop.

4. Payroll tax (~$400 million to $600 million, as the rate changed significantly in recent years).

D.C. businesses pay two major payroll taxes to fund benefits programs for workers: one for unemployment insurance and one for the universal paid leave program.

The unemployment insurance payroll tax operates as part of a federal-state program that exists in every state. In D.C., businesses pay payroll taxes that vary widely from 1.9% to 7.4% (“Table VI”) depending on a business’s past claims activity, plus a 0.2% administrative assessment, all imposed on the first $9,000 paid in each worker’s wages. As a percent of all wages, D.C.’s unemployment insurance tax averages 0.3% and collects $119 million per year to pay benefits. Maryland and Virginia have lower UI taxes: Maryland’s range from 0.3% to 7.5% on the first $8,500 in wages and average 0.2%; Virginia’s range from 0.1% to 6.2% on the first $8,000 in wages and average 0.08%.

Beginning in 2019, D.C. businesses pay a payroll tax to fund the universal paid leave program providing sick leave, family leave, and parental leave. The tax was originally set at 0.26%, sufficient to pay benefits and build a reserve fund, but in 2019 was sharply increased to 0.62%, and again in 2024 to 0.75%, to generate revenue to balance the rest of the city’s budget. D.C.’s budget still superficially describes the tax as the paid family leave tax even though most of the revenue is now transferred to the general fund for other purposes.

5. Commercial property tax ($1.5 billion).

D.C.’s heavy taxes on commercial real estate downtown and in other key areas has historically been a cash cow, generating 37% of D.C. property tax revenue from 2% of the properties. Since the pandemic, though, the sector has become a major cause of D.C.’s recent revenue woes as D.C.’s office market vacancy rate has actually grown since the pandemic to 22 percent. Between 2020 and 2025, slow demand for commercial office space caused D.C.’s 572 largest buildings to fall in value from $66 billion to $56 billion, and as it shows up on annual tax assessments it drags down tax revenues by $200 million a year.

As recently as 1975, tax rates on residential and commercial real estate were equal, but today the differences are very sharp. Residential property in D.C. faces a 0.85% tax on assessed valuation (with homes paying somewhat less in actual tax as a result of a homestead deduction) but commercial property faces tax rates of 1.65% (assessed value less than $5 million), 1.77% (assessed value of $5 million or more), or 1.89% (assessed value of $10 million or more). In addition, property transfers are taxed with a 1.45% deed recordation tax and a 1.45% deed transfer tax. Maryland has equal tax rates on residential and commercial property, with rates varying by jurisdiction between 0.8298% to 1.317%. Virginia has a split roll of higher taxes on commercial property than residential property, with rates ranging from 0.89% to 1.32%.

Other taxes and fees. In addition to those five main taxes, some businesses are also responsible for:

• Business license fees ($12 million). Businesses and non-profits must pay periodic flat dollar fees to the Department of Licensing & Consumer Protection to do business in the District. The recently implemented BEST Act will reduce these fees for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

• Ballpark fee ($51 million). This set dollar amount ($5,500 to $16,500 depending on business size) is used to pay bonds taken out to build the ballpark. The fee was recently renamed the Sports Facilities Fee and extended to the RFK project.

• Bag fee ($1.7 million). Businesses must charge 5 cents for disposable bags and remit 4 cents to the city.

• Sales tax collection. While this $2 billion tax is economically borne by those purchasing goods or services, businesses are legally responsible for collecting and remitting it.

All told, business-paid taxes total approximately $3.5 billion in 2024, a sizable share of the then-$19 billion budget. When including the share of sales tax paid on business inputs, various excise taxes, and income taxes paid by business owners on business income, total state and local business taxes in D.C. total $5.9 billion, or $11,100 per employee. This is 10th highest in the country, and compares to Maryland at $8,300 per employee and Virginia at $7,800 per employee.

The Home Rule Act Bans Commuter Taxes, and the Bishop Case Bans Workarounds

The Home Rule Act § 602(a)(5) bans “any tax on the whole or any portion of the personal income, either directly or at the source. . . of any individual not a resident of the District.” In 1980, the D.C. Court of Appeals held in Bishop v. District of Columbia that D.C.’s Home Rule Act restriction on taxing nonresident income is a broad one, preventing D.C. from expanding its Unincorporated Business Tax to the income earned by nonresident professionals.

D.C. had taken this step in 1975 after three failed attempts to convince Congress to allow D.C. to collect income tax on Maryland and Virginia commuters. Virginia lawyer Richard Bishop (no relation) sued to have the UBT expansion to nonresidents declared illegal. D.C. argued its 1975 law was a business tax, not an income tax, but the court (first a three-judge panel, then the full court) was not convinced. The 8 to 1 majority held: “The professional tax, by its very terms, is a tax on net income…. Appellee would have us hold that this tax is a tax on the right to earn income in the District, measured by the amount of income earned, and nothing more.”

The decision mirrors court decisions in most states that hold that how tax operates, rather than the label used by the legislature, matters more for evaluating a tax’s legality. A tax “on business,” measured by individual income, is actually an individual income tax. Any attempt to work around the Home Rule Act restriction would fail if in practice it was still a tax on individual income of Maryland and Virginia commuters.

Thus, since Bishop, the UBT has been limited to D.C.-resident business owners. But what if a business tax truly was a business tax, but just happened to capture precisely the individual income D.C. sought to tax? One sentence of the Bishop court’s opinion opened the door for what has become the BAT proposal: “That argument would be persuasive if the incident of this tax were the right to do business.” Income taxes are based on profits (revenue minus expenses), but taxes based on franchise value, going concern value, or gross receipts would arguably not be subject to the Home Rule Act restriction on gross or net income taxes. Successfully structuring such a tax could reach what was not allowed in Bishop.

How a DC Business Activity Tax Would Work (in Theory)

The BAT concept sets out to produce what the Bishop court invited: a tax on the right to do business that is truly measured by business activity. But the goal is also to produce what the Bishop court rejected: a tax that reaches the commuter income that cannot be taxed by the Home Rule Act.

To attempt this potentially impossible combination, the BAT must (superficially, at least) be a tax on all businesses, but with subtractions (deductions and credits) to hold harmless all but the targeted commuter income. At its core, the BAT consists of four interconnected elements:

1. The BAT is a tax on the right to do business, as Bishop invited. It is not a tax collected by business but legally imposed on individuals, like the income tax or sales tax. While it may economically be passed on to others, it legally is imposed on the business itself.

2. The BAT is a tax on all businesses, corporate and non-corporate, profit and non-profit. It would apply both to existing taxpaying businesses but also those who currently have no liability under the existing franchise tax and unincorporated business tax (primarily, non-corporate businesses with non-residential owners).

3. The BAT is a tax on gross receipts at a certain rate. A tax on profits (receipts minus expenses) would simply duplicate the existing system and in any event could not be applied to non-corporate businesses with non-residential owners because of Bishop. A flat dollar tax on every business (similar to the Ballpark Fee) would not raise much revenue unless set at levels likely to burden local businesses. A flat dollar tax per employee (as recommended by the 2013 Tax Revision Commission) or an indirect tax on commuter income (such as a congestion charge like New York City’s) might survive Bishop scrutiny but invite other policy tradeoffs. This leaves a gross receipts tax as the designer’s preferred policy option.

4. The BAT is structured to reduce and offset other existing business taxes. Recent BAT proposals would subtract purchases, rent, and capital investment, and then credit BAT liability against the franchise tax and unincorporated business tax. Without these subtractions, the BAT would be a significant tax increase on existing D.C.-based businesses rather than a mechanism for targeted untaxed income earned by non-residential owners of non-corporate businesses. However, such subtractions also reduce the potential net revenue from a BAT.

If all these components are done together, the resulting tax may avoid Bishop scrutiny as it reaches commuter income while holding existing D.C. businesses harmless. However, this legal theory remains untested, and the underlying purpose of avoiding Bishop remains a vulnerability.

The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute has prepared calculations of a 2% BAT for two example businesses, one an existing business that would be held harmless thanks to the proposed subtractions and credits, and the other a non-corporate business owned by non-residents who would pay D.C. tax for the first time:

The DCFPI analysis cites a 2023 D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis calculation of a 2% BAT raising $388 million per year, which would include the credits against the franchise tax and the unincorporated business tax but not repeals or reductions of other business taxes. Because the BAT as designed would aim to hold existing taxpayers harmless, most of this revenue would be from non-resident professionals like accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, and real estate agents. After adjusting to remove exemptions for interest and dividends paid and upwardly adjusting GDP, DCFPI estimates a 2% BAT would generate approximately $500 million per year. The analysis, however, uses 2020 business filing figures and assumes zero dynamic changes (such as from business locations or modifications) from the implementation of the tax.

DC’s Tax Revision Commissions Have Considered BATs, Weighing Bishop and the Flaws of GRTs

D.C. establishes a Tax Revision Commission every decade or so to make recommendations to the Council, and each recent one has studied a BAT. The 1998 Tax Revision Commission recommended that the Council enact a BAT at 1.5% rate while abolishing three of the other business taxes completely (the franchise tax, the unincorporated business tax, and the personal property tax) and ending business license fees, which together would have been roughly revenue-neutral. The 2013 Tax Revision Commission dropped a BAT concept and instead recommended all D.C. businesses (including non-profits) pay a $100 per employee per year service fee; this remains the most significant unimplemented recommendation from the 2013 report.

A BAT again became the core concept considered by the 2024 Tax Revision Commission. Staff initially prepared a 1.4% BAT on revenue above $200,000, minus purchases, rent, and capital investment. The revenue-neutral tax swap would completely repeal the unincorporated business tax and the personal property tax, and reduce the commercial property tax rate by 10 cents. After feedback expressed concern about the BAT rate and the need to reduce the payroll tax, staff prepared a revised version with a 0.9% BAT (0.5% on nonprofits) on revenue above $200,000, minus purchases, rent, and capital investment, and creditable against franchise tax or unincorporated business tax liability. That revenue-neutral tax swap would increase the non-filing threshold for the personal property tax, potentially repeal the unincorporated business tax, and return the payroll tax to 0.26%. The lack of consensus on the Commission toward the BAT, and the lack of a non-BAT fallback, ultimately led to the Commission producing no recommendations.

One reason for the BAT reluctance of the 2013 and 2024 Commissions is that gross receipts taxes are rare because they are disfavored as economically problematic. GRTs tax unprofitable businesses as much as profitable ones and can pyramid, or heavily burden businesses arbitrarily based on how vertically integrated they are or how many transactions they have. Grocery stores, for instance, have high gross receipts and numbers of transactions but low profitability. Aside from narrow GRTs on insurance premiums or bank shares, such a method of taxing business is the exception not the rule in state and local finance.

Nine states currently have GRTs, with rates mostly ranging between 0.25% and 0.75%. However, the tradeoff is much more obvious for 7 of those states which do not have one of the other major taxes (income or sales) at all. Only Ohio and Virginia have a GRT while also having both an income and a sales tax, and the GRT rates in those states are no higher than 0.58%. A D.C. BAT proposal at a higher rate, and that keeps income and sales taxes, would be unique in the competitive context.

The 2024 Commission especially looked at the New Hampshire Business Enterprise Tax (BET), which would be structurally most similar to the proposed BAT structure. The BET, imposed at a 0.55% rate, subtracts purchases, rent, and capital investment to attempt to avoid the pyramiding inherent in GRTs and essentially more resemble a value-added tax (VAT). However, New Hampshire’s experience has also been one of cutting its BET rates: once 0.75%, the BET has been reduced four times since 2015 to keep the state competitive. New Hampshire also has neither an income tax nor a sales tax.

Conclusion

The proposed Business Activity Tax promises both to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue and to avoid increasing taxes on existing businesses, but those goals may be difficult to reconcile. Its legal viability remains uncertain, its revenue estimates assume businesses will not change their behavior, and gross receipts taxation risks imposing new burdens on businesses regardless of profitability. Earlier Tax Revision Commissions recognized these tradeoffs and considered a BAT primarily as part of a revenue-neutral overhaul that would eliminate or reduce other business taxes.

With D.C. businesses already paying some of the highest taxes in the country and the District struggling to grow its commercial economy, policymakers should be careful not to just layer on another tax.

Subscribe now

Vox: How one city made gains on school integration without trying
Washington, DC’s experience shows that progress is hard — but not impossible.

During the 2000s and 2010s, [Washington D.C.’s] public schools underwent a dramatic set of reforms that helped improve teaching and student achievement. At the same time, the number of white students leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about 20 percentage points, the largest drop among the country’s 50 biggest cities.

Recently, I called Kaya Henderson, DC’s former top schools official, to ask about that era of progress, and whether she thought the policies she implemented had helped encourage integration. If not, what had? Her answer surprised me a bit: It simply wasn’t a question she had ever really pondered.

For me, integration was never the point,” Henderson said. “Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.”

City Cast: JLG’s Dangerous Schools Proposal

D.C.’s school system has been on an upward trajectory for the last three mayoral administrations. While challenges remain, in contrast with other large urban school districts, D.C. schools have rebounded post-pandemic. Students have made significant gains in both math and reading for four straight years, with proficiency up 8 points in reading and 10 points in math post-COVID.

Most importantly for those who would dismiss the gains in our school system over the last two decades as merely a byproduct of gentrification and more white and high-income families attending public schools, the correlation between the socioeconomic status of a school and its test scores is the lowest it has ever been. This means our schools are making real progress in teaching low-income students of color to read, write and do math on grade level.

This question is currently under consideration by D.C. Superior Court, and the outcome could have implications far beyond this case—and potentially put the safety of Washingtonians at risk.

The D.C. Council, Bowser Administration, and Office of the Attorney General have all come down on the side of “yes.” Acts of violence should warrant a fast-track eviction. The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia is pushing for the answer to be “no.” D.C. Superior Court will hear arguments on this question later this month.

I first became aware of this case back in August, when Washington Sun reporter Martin Austermuhle posted about the Public Defender Service’s intervention and efforts to significantly broaden the case’s implications.

We’ll get to that after walking through the law and history, as the context is important. A single eviction case would not normally warrant an examination in this outlet but, as you’ll see, there are much broader implications for public safety pending the outcome.

What Happened and What’s the Legal Standard?

In March 2026, according to his landlord’s complaint, the defendant walked into the leasing office of his Navy Yard apartment building, screamed at the manager, brandished a butcher-style knife, and punched the manager in the head. He then kicked at the office’s door while shouting threats, and later resisted arrest. The day before, the complaint states, he had menaced the same employee in a similar manner.

Securing a criminal conviction and taking back an apartment have long been treated differently in the American legal system. A conviction rightly requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt because an individual’s freedom is at stake, whereas an eviction is a civil case over the right to live in—or possess, in legal parlance—a particular property. Civil cases are ordinarily decided by a preponderance of the evidence, or more likely than not. This is a lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Many states apply that civil standard to evictions based on criminal conduct and do not make landlords wait for a criminal case to finish.

For example, just across the Potomac, Virginia law treats a criminal or willful act that threatens health or safety as a violation that cannot be cured (or fixed), allowing a landlord to terminate the tenancy without waiting for a conviction. The landlord must prove the violation by a preponderance of the evidence, and the initial hearing must be held within 15 days of service. Federal rules for public housing are similar. A housing authority may evict for criminal activity once it determines the activity occurred, whether or not the person was arrested or convicted and without meeting the criminal standard of proof.

This intuitively makes sense. If a person punches building staff or a fellow resident, management would not want that person to continue residing in the building—even if the conduct does not result in a criminal conviction—given the need to protect staff and residents and ensure their peace of mind at work or home.

D.C. was an outlier in this regard. For decades, a landlord in the District could evict for criminal activity in a unit only after a court had already determined that the illegal act occurred. In practice, that meant waiting for a conviction, while the accused tenant stayed next door to the neighbors and staff they allegedly threatened.

What the Council did in the RENTAL Act

The RENTAL Act, effective December 31, 2025, brought D.C. closer to its neighbors for the most serious cases by amending the Rental Housing Act. The push for this change was driven by an uptick in violence toward building staff and other tenants during the pandemic.

The Washington Post had previously reported on the increasing difficulty of keeping buildings safe for all residents, focusing on a property manager who was assaulted while trying to keep order in the building.

“Arms flew at [Keith] Carr. The force sent him down the stairs toward the basement. Then the young man was on top of him, the landlord said, swinging and kicking. Carr broke free and sprinted through the back entrance to his car. According to video footage from the building’s camera, his alleged attacker came out the front door, returned with friends, smashed the front glass door and chased after Carr. “It seems like they were running back to finish me off,” he said.”

When the alleged illegal act would constitute a “dangerous crime” or a “crime of violence” as defined in D.C. law, and was not committed in self-defense or defense of another, the landlord must first consider in good faith reasonable ways to preserve the housing of non-offending occupants, such as barring the offender or transferring the lease, and may then serve a 10-day notice to vacate.

The Court must then hold an expedited hearing within 20 days of the complaint being filed. If the Court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the tenant or occupant engaged in such a crime, it must enter a final judgment for possession and issue a writ of restitution.

The Council shaped this policy deliberately. Mayor Bowser’s original bill would have allowed eviction after an arrest. The Housing Committee narrowed that approach. Committee Chair Robert White said its version would let courts move quickly in cases involving violent crime charges rather than mere arrests.

Then, before the full Council voted, a substitute amendment removed the requirement that a prosecutor’s indictment be attached to the notice, citing concerns about undue delay, and allowed cases to proceed on the landlord’s allegation. White’s memo described how this change would work: Landlords would allege a crime of violence to qualify for an expedited hearing, and a judge would decide by a preponderance of the evidence whether it in fact happened.

What District Government Says the Law Means

The D.C. agency charged with implementing the Rental Housing Act and any amendments to the law, the Rental Housing Commission, has read the statute the same way.

In proposed rules published in April, the Commission concluded that the Council intended a separate process for dangerous or violent crimes that does not require a prior judicial determination. Under that reading, a notice may rest solely on the landlord’s allegation, and the Landlord-Tenant Branch must hold an expedited hearing on the allegation and any defenses using a preponderance standard.

The Commission also addressed the most serious self-incrimination concern. Its proposed rules would require the notice to tell tenants they may defend themselves at a hearing but have the right to remain silent, and that anything they say in their defense may be used against them in a criminal case—a Fifth Amendment safeguard was written into the proposed rules.

What the Court Did

At a June hearing, the landlord’s counsel asked Judge Shana Frost Matini for a judgment based on the complaint and the police affidavit supporting the tenant’s arrest. The Court declined, noting that the tenant had a right to challenge the evidence against him and could not cross-examine a police affidavit. The Attorney General’s office later agreed that the law requires an evidentiary hearing before any judgment.

Then, according to the case summary, Judge Matini raised a Fifth Amendment concern on her own: The tenant had a pending felony case, so defending himself in the eviction could mean giving up his right to remain silent in the criminal case. She remarked that the new amendments had put the Court in a very uncomfortable position. The hearing notes described her remarks:1

THE COURT WILL REFER THIS MATTER OUT TO LEGAL SERVICE PROVIDERS FOR INVOLVEMENT. THE COURT INDICATES THAT WITH THE RECENT AMENDMENTS IT HAS PLACED THE COURT IN A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION.

She then referred the case to the Public Defender Service (PDS). The Court’s subsequent order says PDS agreed to appear “at the undersigned’s request.”

The court also notes that…the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia has agreed, at the undersigned’s request, to seek to appear as amicus curiae for the purpose of filing an amicus brief to address constitutional issues raised by the RENTAL Act.

Amicus briefs are usually filed by outside groups that ask to participate. Here, Judge Matini recruited the outside group. But, according to the Attorney General’s brief, her invitation was limited to advising the tenant about his Fifth Amendment rights and brief whether the case could proceed while his criminal case was pending. It was PDS that added arguments under the Seventh Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

PDS’s July brief then goes far beyond this individual case and asks the Court to hold that the fast track does not dispense with the old requirement of a prior court determination at all. So, PDS is urging the Court to adopt a reading of the law that the Council’s legislative history, the Rental Housing Commission’s proposed rules, and the Attorney General’s office all reject. If the Court accepts it, a trial judge would effectively rewrite a law passed by the Council, signed by the Mayor, and supported by the Attorney General.

(The individual at issue here pleaded guilty to attempted assault with a dangerous weapon and a misdemeanor stalking-order violation. He was sentenced and waived his right to appeal.)

Under that reading, the 20-day hearing would resolve nothing, and eviction could follow only after a full trial. That is the opposite of Council intent and the conclusion the District’s rule making agency. The brief relies on the Council’s rejection of the arrest-based version of the bill, but does not address the later amendment that dropped the indictment requirement, or White’s memo, which the Attorney General’s brief quotes, explaining that change.

In light of the guilty plea, PDS now argues that the defendant, whom it describes as having a mental disability, may still have a defense under the federal Fair Housing Act. So even the prior criminal determination that PDS says the law requires is now in place, and the case continues. A statute that promised a hearing within 20 days of filing has produced a motion hearing set for late October, more than six months after the complaint was filed.

On September 28, Attorney General Brian Schwalb intervened to defend the RENTAL Act. His office’s brief argues first that Judge Matini should not decide the constitutional questions at all. The defendant’s guilty plea, sentencing, and waiver of appeal have made the Fifth Amendment issue moot. He never demanded a jury or raised a disability defense. And, the District contends, ruling on issues the tenant never raised would violate the “party presentation principle” the Supreme Court enforced in United States v. Sineneng-Smith (2020), a case in which the Court faulted the Ninth Circuit for inviting amici to brief constitutional problems the parties hadn’t raised. The brief puts it bluntly:

“Although the Court invited PDS’s participation, the Court’s invitation was only to ‘advise’ Chambers on his Fifth Amendment privilege and brief the Court on whether or how it could proceed in Chambers’s case while he has a pending criminal proceeding. Nonetheless, PDS took the opportunity to raise broader issues with the RENTAL Act and advocate for an interpretation that would govern future cases. That hijacking of this case is simply incompatible with the party presentation principle or the limited role that the Court originally envisioned for PDS.”

If the Court does reach PDS’s arguments, the District says they fail. The statute’s text, the legislative history culminating in Councilmember White’s amendment, and the Rental Housing Commission’s proposed rules all show the Council deliberately let landlords start fast-track cases on an allegation, with a judge deciding by a preponderance of the evidence whether the crime occurred. Requiring a prior conviction, the District argues, would effectively rewrite the law.

As of publication, a separate case filed by the landlord alleging more than $30,000 in unpaid rent is currently pending, with a virtual initial hearing not scheduled until 2027. The virtual hearing would occur roughly one year after the complaint alleges the tenant last paid rent. (Frankly, it’s no wonder housing investment in the District of Columbia has collapsed under these conditions. In subsequent articles, we will explore the backlog of rent nonpayment cases at Superior Court, which is more complex than the issue of evictions for act of violence.)

The defendant’s current attorney at Equal Justice Under Law provided the following statement on the issues at hand. PDS did not respond to a request for comment.

“Equal Justice Under Law fundamentally believes that our courts should treat rich and poor alike, but far too often, the legal system advantages the wealthy while disadvantaging those living in poverty. Our city’s affordable housing crisis is one example where wealth-inequality in the justice system can be abused to harm people living in poverty. In our view, the Constitution guarantees equal access to the courts, meaning that underrepresented people and communities are entitled to be heard without presumptions drawn against them before they walk into court. When it comes to evictions for alleged criminal activity in the past, we think it important to balance allegations about past danger with the important right of each person to their home—mere allegations of past dangerousness should not, by themselves, leave someone on the street.”

Why it Matters

The outcome of this case reaches beyond one apartment or one property. A source familiar with Superior Court proceedings indicates that evictions for acts of violence are largely stalled while this case is pending. The Attorney General’s brief similar notes that at a May hearing, a magistrate judge said fast-track eviction cases were being assigned to Judge Matini.

Judge Matini’s eventual ruling will formally bind only this case unless the D.C. Court of Appeals takes it up. But as long as the question is pending, the Council’s change has been effectively on hold.

I would be remiss if I did not affirmatively state that being evicted is an incredibly difficult circumstance for a person to confront and in a perfect world there would be no need to evict anyone from their housing. But confronted with the choice between removing an individual who committed a serious act of violence and ensuring the safety of the residents and staff of this apartment building, I think the District needs to prioritize the 95% of citizens doing the right thing.

What’s Next

The Council also has an opportunity to clarify the law and affirm that it meant what it said when they passed the RENTAL Act. The pending Housing Investment Protection Act (Bill 26-758), which the Mayor proposed in July and which would delete the statutory language PDS relies on, provides a venue to do this.

Subscribe now

Medicaid, which provides health insurance for adults and children with limited resources, is jointly financed by the federal government and the states (and DC). The federal government pays a share (the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage or FMAP) of each state’s costs, set by a formula that compares the state’s income per person with the national average. The poorer the state, the higher the share. Mississippi, the lowest-income state, gets about 77 percent. The FMAP for high-income states like Maryland and Virginia is the minimum of 50 percent.

Based on the formula that applies to the states, the District’s FMAP would be 50 percent. Instead, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which also included the Revitalization Act, set its rate at 70 percent. As a result, DC pays only 30 cents of each dollar spent on Medicaid for its traditional beneficiaries (children, parents, pregnant women, seniors, people with disabilities). Adults covered by the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, basically everyone below 138 percent of the federal poverty line who does not qualify otherwise, are matched at 90 percent.

Relative to its population size, DC has the most expensive Medicaid program in the country. In 2024, the latest year for which comparable figures exist for every state, the federal government spent $4,348 on Medicaid per District resident. That is two and a half times the national average of about $1,700, and far ahead of Kentucky, in second place at $3,056. Maryland and Virginia received about $1,700 and $1,600. The matching rate explains only part of the gap. Combining local and federal dollars, DC spends about $5,900 per resident, 2.2 times the national average. Even compared only with the 40 states that have expanded Medicaid, the District spends almost twice as much per resident.

We can decompose this spending gap into two similarly sized parts: about 40 percent more enrollees per resident, and about 40 percent more spending per enrollee. In 2024, the District enrolled a greater share of its residents in Medicaid (39 percent against 28 percent) and spent more on its Medicaid enrollees ($15,200 per enrollee, against about $11,000) than the expansion states did.

The main drivers of the enrollment gap were the District’s relatively large poor population and more generous eligibility criteria,1 though the official count may also have been inflated by people who were no longer eligible.

Where does the extra spending per enrollee come from? It does not come from the expansion population. DC spends about $7,500 a year on each expansion adult, almost exactly what expansion states spend on average.2 It does not really come from the composition of DC’s Medicaid pool either. The mix of enrollees explains only about a tenth of the gap.

Nearly 90 percent of the extra spending per enrollee comes from higher spending on traditional Medicaid beneficiaries, especially people with disabilities and seniors. DC spends about $48,900 a year per enrollee with a disability, 1.7 times the expansion-state average, and $31,200 per senior, 1.5 times. These two groups make up a fifth of DC’s enrollees but three-fifths of its Medicaid spending.

Some of this simply reflects generous rates and service levels. The clearest case is care for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. DC rebuilt its system under court supervision after the scandal at its Forest Haven institution. About 220 people live in DC’s intermediate care facilities, small group homes with nursing care that cost roughly $415,000 a year per resident. An additional 1,900 residents are served under DC’s Medicaid waiver for this group, roughly as many per resident as elsewhere. DC budgets close to $200,000 per year for them. In 2021, the latest year with comparable data, its projected spending per participant was already higher than that of any state, at nearly three times the national average.

But some of it reflects straightforward fraud and overbilling. Many DC residents may see fraud as an overblown concern after Elon Musk and Marco Rubio used it as a pretext to shut down USAID, but it is beyond dispute that DC’s Medicaid program has been plagued by it. In 2024, DC paid $284 million for “community support,” outpatient mental health services billed in 15-minute increments, four times as much as in 2019. Providers based in DC, a city with 0.2 percent of the country’s population, received almost 30 percent of all nationwide spending under the billing code DC uses for community support.

In January, Wayne Turnage, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services and Director of the Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF), told the Council that the program “is rife with fraudulent claiming among a significant minority of providers.” Providers billed for people who were in jail or dead; workers billed impossible hours or through multiple providers for services that were never delivered. Fifteen providers, whose fiscal year 2024 claims totaled more than $124 million, had their payments suspended. Six behavioral health providers’ Medicaid agreements were terminated in fiscal year 2026. Fraud in just this category of care, where about 2 percent of DC’s 2019 Medicaid spending took place, may account for roughly 11 to 17 percent of DC’s overall higher spending per enrollee. The amount of funds involved is similar to the Department of Public Works’ entire budget.

What is particularly grating is that DC went through a very similar fraud scandal just a decade earlier. In 2006, the District paid about $40 million for personal care aides, who help people bathe, dress, and eat at home, for some 2,500 Medicaid beneficiaries. By 2013, about 10,000 people had been certified for the service, and between 2011 and 2013 spending jumped from $102 million to $262 million. Home care agencies were allowed to assess potential clients, decide how many hours of care they needed, and then provide the care themselves. Some agencies paid beneficiaries kickbacks to sign up and coached them on what to tell their doctors. The District referred several agencies to fraud investigators starting in 2009, but the open investigations kept it from acting against them for years. It took an FBI raid on five agencies in February 2014, with more than 20 arrests, to change things. Five of the agencies DC targeted for suspension or termination at the time have since received a combined $820 million in DC Medicaid payments.

Should we believe that DHCF and the Department of Behavioral Health are careful stewards of taxpayer money, except when they overlook fraudulent billing on a scale even a quick glance at their own budgets ought to reveal? The more plausible reading is that the generous rates and the fraud both result from a lack of oversight by District authorities and their federal counterparts.

A contributing factor to this is surely that a dollar of fraud only costs DC 30 cents, or 10 cents for expansion adults. The traditional political economy story is that of a race to the bottom: cities underprovide redistribution because it attracts poor households and drives away the taxpayers who pay for it. Federal subsidies can change this story by reducing the burden very low-income residents place on city budgets. For some policymakers that can make low-income residents more attractive than working-class residents: they cost little in net terms, but they sustain a larger bureaucracy. In that sense, the size and structure of its Medicaid grant may reinforce DC’s income distribution, hollowed out in the middle.

Medicaid is most of DC’s federal funding. If DC were treated like a state, it would receive a lower Medicaid FMAP but would be able to raise more own-source revenue. That in turn would change the incentives the District faces, including when it comes to choosing how many people to cover, how much to pay providers, and how hard to look for fraud.

First, nearly every kid you see on a shared-fleet scooter or ebike in D.C. shouldn’t be there. With the exception of Capital Bikeshare, which allows riders 16 and over, every operator in D.C. currently requires that riders be at least 18 years old.

Second, I’m going to talk in this post about the bike- and scooter-share operators’ Low Income Customer Programs (LICP): their structure, their confused incentives, and the ways they’re set to change. But I can’t prove to you that the kids you see on scooters and ebikes are there via LICP. That they are is clearly the surmise of many observers in D.C., and doubtless this is rooted in race and other observable class markers. I acknowledge that we could spend many engaging online hours yelling at one another about this.

I’d prefer to skip that for now, though, and focus instead on explaining LICP and why it may be contributing to the problems associated with kids using and misusing our city’s shared micromobility fleets.

Besides, the best reason for guessing that many of the kids we see riding scooters are using LICP is simple: rental scooters and ebikes are expensive! A 15 minute ride is typically between $5 and $8 on the fleets’ pay-as-you-go plans. The devices are undeniably fun, and I’m sure some young people spend their pocket money on an occasional joyride. But when you see kids cruising aimlessly or keeping active but unridden scooters at hand while hanging out with friends, it’s reasonable to wonder how it’s being paid for.

Subscribe now

How Does LICP Work?

One more bit of throat-clearing: much of the following doesn’t apply to Capital Bikeshare. CaBi is owned by a regional partnership and uses docks. DDOT contracts with Lyft to run CaBi (in fact, they were awarded a new contract just last week). By contrast, Lime, Hopp, and Veo all own their fleets, are dockless, and operate under permits from DDOT. CaBi has its own low-income program, but it’s not defined by the same set of rules that the dockless operators face.

The LICP requirement wasn’t present when DDOT’s dockless program debuted in 2018, but in 2019 the city began requiring it for fleet size increases, formalizing it in regulation the following year. The scale and obligations associated with LICP expanded significantly in 2022, and today it seems to be a major part of how operators manage their relationship with the city, to the point where some do fawning press hits about it.

Under LICP operators must offer an option for D.C.’s low-income residents that meets certain requirements:

• Participants receive unlimited trips under 30 minutes

• No device deposit can be required

• Cash payment must be possible

Lime, Veo, and Hopp each run their own version of LICP, with some differences between them. But in all cases the eligibility mechanism revolves around confirming participation in some other low-income support program. All of the operators extend LICP to SNAP recipients, but credentials from other programs like TANF, Medicaid, the National School Lunch Program, Pell Grants, or showing a discounted utility bill can also qualify.

Fleet operators must show a minimum amount of LICP use before they can apply to increase their fleet size, and the size of that increase is tied to the percentage of trips that are LICP. Perhaps most significantly, the per-device fees that operators pay to the city–currently set to $10/month, though soon to be inflation-indexed–are rebated at a percentage based on 10x the mileage percentage. So at 1% of miles, operators get back 10% of their fees, and this scales up to 100% of fees when 10% of miles are attributable to LICP users. This doesn’t add up to an enormous pot of money–based on fleet size numbers from Ride Report, it’s likely less than $2 million per year across all operators. But the combination of incentives seem to be working: DDOT reports that 11% of trips were taken by LICP participants as of 2024.

How Do Kids End Up Riding These Things?

Establishing the facts about how LICP is supposed to work is easy: we can just look them up. Figuring out how kids wind up on scooters and ebikes is harder. But we can make some educated guesses.

The most obvious angle is sharing account credentials across devices, like letting your sister use your Netflix password. Alternately, adults who qualify but are uninterested in using the benefit might give or sell credentials to a young person who wants it.

There are parts of the program that are harder to guess about. Each operator offers a “group ride” function allowing multiple vehicles to be unlocked at once. This isn’t supposed to be used for kids, but in practice there are no real controls preventing it. It’s not completely clear whether group rides are eligible for LICP, but it may be usable for at least some fleets (particularly given the incentive structure operators face).

Similarly, DDOT’s requirements around cash payment and low- or no-device access to the vehicles, including via SMS unlock, may offer paths to improper access that are hard to detect and prevent. These program requirements come from an admirable desire to avoid excluding people without smartphones or formal banking options. But other cities have had serious problems when bad actors begin taking advantage of these kinds of accommodations, and smartphone penetration is now exceptionally high, particularly among the younger cohorts that favor bikes and scooters. We don’t have any evidence that DDOT collects information on how widely these payment options are used, nor much insight into how they interact with program priorities that require us to know who’s riding.

For ebikes, simple theft also plays a role. If you see a someone riding a Lime bike that’s clicking weirdly, it’s likely because they’ve defeated the lock and are riding it without its e-assist.

Operators Aren’t Incentivized to Stop Underage Rides

Fleet operators can get fee rebates and fleet increases based on LICP participation rates (the former for miles, the latter for trips). DDOT requires that LICP be made available to customers at or below 200% of the federal poverty guideline, but how the fleets operationalize this is up to them. The agency doesn’t set a verification standard or require any reporting on it. Nor is there any mechanism I can see that disincentivizes underage LICP riding. The rules say, in effect: get your LICP numbers up to 10%—we won’t be checking how you do it.

LICP Has Been Changing, and More Change is Coming

Still, it would be wrong to suggest that the operators haven’t worked to address underage riding. A number of voluntary measures have been put in place to discourage underage use, seemingly in response to government requests and unwanted media attention related to dockless vehicles’ frequent use in crime (a problem that may be getting worse).

Lime, which operates the largest fleet in D.C., appears to be at the forefront of these changes, limiting LICP use to a single logged-in device, raising the monthly fee for Lime Access (to $30, now $15), requiring monthly reenrollment, and requiring smartphone selfie-checks. Those checks are currently designed to evaluate the rider’s age, not to confirm their identity as the account holder, but Lime says this is set to change. Veo and Hopp’s LICP rules and fees seem to be looser.

But a bigger change is in the offing for all of the dockless operators. The same rulemaking that I discussed in my last post will, as drafted, restructure the central LICP benefit entirely, moving it from unlimited rides under 30 minutes to a fixed monthly benefit of 300 minutes that don’t roll over (plus a 50% discount on fees after that). This is structurally similar to how CaBi revised their low-income benefit in 2025.

The rule language also seems to assume a “reasonable” monthly fee for LICP participation, though exactly what this means isn’t defined. Taken together, these measures could make it more expensive and annoying for a qualifying adult to hand their LICP benefit to a kid who shouldn’t have it.

It’s Still All Carrots, With Few Sticks

These changes may help. But some of them are underspecified in the rule. And there’s still no clear requirement that would make operators inform DDOT about the part of the underage rider problem that they can see, nor much mechanism to encourage them to take it more seriously as they seek to keep their LICP participation rate up. The rule’s penalties are focused on what happens if LICP rates fall, not on ensuring that LICP use is legitimate.

Reasonable people can disagree on how much of a problem this is. Making our city’s micromobility program accessible to everyone is a worthwhile goal: the bikes and scooters impose some minor costs on us all, and it makes sense that we should all share the benefits, too. Whether those benefits should extend to teen joyrides rather than nuts-and-bolts mobility is a matter of opinion. But there’s no question that, under the current rules, kids aren’t supposed to be using these devices.

And, to the extent that our inability to verify rider identity is making ebikes and scooters useful to criminals, it represents an obvious and pressing problem. The city shouldn’t be subsidizing getaway vehicles. This must be weighed against the needs of residents for whom smartphone apps aren’t an option, but there are real tradeoffs here–ones that we probably need more data to fully understand. The success of D.C.’s Throne public bathrooms, which provide an amenity in part by using technology to prevent its abuse, suggests there’s a balance we can strike.

Improving the LICP program has the potential to preserve legitimate use while addressing these problems. DDOT will be accepting comments on the open rulemaking until October 4.

Capital Commonsense readers can share their perspective by writing to Jason Rubinstein, Policy Analyst, Policy and Legislative Affairs Division, Office of the Director, DDOT, 250 M Street SE, 8th Floor, Washington DC 20003 or publicspace.policy@dc.gov. If you refer to the NPRM on “Shared Fleet Devices (Notice ID N146433), 73 DCR Vol. 73/36, published September 4, 2026” he’ll know what you’re talking about.

Image adapted from photos published by STATter911 and local television station WJLA. Photo credits: Ostertag family / STATter911; Billie Shepperd / WJLA; Griffin family / WJLA.

The first 911 call came at 6:13:59 p.m. Dispatchers assigned a basic life-support ambulance less than two minutes later. At 6:18:35, the dispatch record noted that a nurse would perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Dispatchers assigned advanced life-support units at 6:21:46, nearly eight minutes after the first call. Nearby responders registered on scene 32 seconds later.

Dave Statter reconstructed those times from dispatch and medical records. Responders restarted William’s heart, but he never regained consciousness. He died 11 days later. The records cannot establish whether earlier care would have saved him. They do show that several minutes passed between the first mention of CPR and the assignment of advanced life-support units, even with a staffed fire station less than 250 feet away.

His mother, Stephanie Clemans, sued for the recordings. Statter reported in February 2026 that she finally had them. More than a year after William’s collapse, his family had secured evidence that could help them understand how the city responded that evening.

I told this story over and over again on the campaign trail. William was a friend of one of my best friends, Eric, who later became our campaign’s policy director. But the warnings about D.C.’s 911 system long predated my campaign.

Dave Statter, a former television reporter, firefighter, emergency medical technician (EMT) and dispatcher, has covered fire and emergency medical services (EMS) on STATter911 since 2007. In 2020, he wrote that months of monitoring emergency radio traffic had yielded about 200 documented incidents.

The cases that Statter and other local reporters have documented show how far back these problems reach. Before William’s family sought answers, other families had endured crews sent to the wrong location, critical updates that went unnoticed and dispatch problems during a computer outage. City watchdogs, meanwhile, repeatedly identified weaknesses in supervision and the handling of errors. By the time I told William’s story on the campaign trail, residents and investigators had already given the city years of warnings.

The next mayor must make D.C. 911 reform a day-one priority. When a parent calls because their child cannot breathe, or someone calls after an elderly neighbor collapses, the city’s response can determine whether that person lives or dies. Every one of us could become that caller. We should not have to lose someone before we insist that the system works.

Figure 1. Families’ emergencies alongside years of official warnings. The Inspector General’s 2026 inspection covered fiscal 2020 through the third quarter of fiscal 2025; the Office of Unified Communications (OUC) reported further changes in 2026. Sources: WJLA, STATter911, The Washington Post, D.C. Auditor and D.C. Inspector General.

The city has raised pay, added training and begun new reviews of calls. Those efforts matter. But residents still need to know whether the problems described in these reports have been corrected. Older findings cannot tell us whether a recent change worked; that requires a follow-up. I want the next mayor to make those results public and take responsibility for the work that remains. Here is what I would ask of the officials running the system.

Who runs DC 911

D.C.’s Office of Unified Communications handles 911 call-taking, dispatch, 311 and public-safety communications technology. Police and Fire and EMS operate separately, under the same deputy mayor’s public-safety portfolio.

Police and fire communications shared a facility beginning in 2001; OUC took over management in 2004. OUC’s dispatchers must get accurate information to police officers, firefighters and paramedics, even though those crews answer to separate agencies.

Director Heather McGaffin’s April 2026 testimony reported that OUC answered 97 percent of calls within 20 seconds and earned training accreditation. The Inspector General credited improvements in vacancies, training and wellness while finding persistent management weaknesses.

Why McGaffin should be replaced

The next mayor should replace Heather McGaffin. The director of a 911 center is responsible for making sure supervisors catch dangerous mistakes and that the agency learns from calls that go wrong. When those safeguards fail, a caller whose child has stopped breathing can lose minutes they do not have. The repeated weaknesses documented at OUC are serious enough to warrant a change in leadership.

The 2021 audit identified inadequate supervision and management follow-up. The 2023 review found that OUC had overstated progress. The April 2026 inspection, covering fiscal 2020 through the third quarter of fiscal 2025, again found supervision gaps and a failure to analyze call reviews systematically for recurring problems. Without that analysis, managers can miss a pattern of errors and leave the next caller exposed to the same failure. These reports span more than one director’s tenure. But McGaffin joined OUC in 2020 and became deputy director in 2022; she has been part of the leadership responsible for correcting these problems, not a newcomer just learning about them.

McGaffin has relevant dispatch and management experience, and OUC has improved answer times and training while reducing vacancies. Keeping her would allow her to finish the changes she has begun. The older reports do not establish whether the new supervisor training or outage exercise worked. Even so, I believe the repeated management failures during her years in leadership warrant a replacement. The next mayor should start the search during the transition and have independent reviewers check the work already underway. Her successor should have to answer for the same failures if they continue.

A national search should seek a director who has reduced dispatch errors and can show how those results were measured. Candidates should demonstrate that they can keep experienced employees, cover every shift and turn findings from failed calls into changes that hold up on the dispatch floor. The search committee should check those claims with frontline staff, medical leaders and independent oversight officials. Finalists should work through a staffing exercise and an anonymized dispatch failure, explaining what they would change and how they would test it.

An experienced operator should lead OUC during the search. Outgoing managers should document unfinished work and provide the records behind any claim that a problem has been fixed. The mayor should also review senior managers’ performance and use the applicable personnel process to replace those who fall short, while keeping qualified staff on every shift. Employees who report a dangerous mistake need a supervisor who will do something about it.

1. Acting when a patient gets worse

Aaron Boyd Jr. was three months old when someone found him in a hot car on August 9, 2022. An update said someone had removed the baby from the car; the emergency response was canceled. A later update reported cardiac arrest. WJLA found that the critical information went unnoticed for roughly eight minutes. Aaron died. OUC expressed condolences and announced an investigation.

When a caller reports that a patient’s condition has worsened, staff must reassess the response, with a supervisor intervening if dispatch stalls. William’s call, two years after Aaron’s, raises the same concern about acting on urgent information. As the timeline below shows, 3 minutes and 11 seconds passed between the first CPR note and the assignment of advanced life-support units. The Fire and EMS medical director should set the rules for responding to those updates; OUC’s director must make sure staff understand and follow them.

Figure 3. William’s call: 3 minutes 11 seconds passed between the first CPR note and assignment of advanced life-support units. Source: Dave Statter’s reconstruction of dispatch and medical records.

Brooke Pinto, Janeese Lewis George and Anita Bonds introduced B26-0599 in February 2026 to make the Fire and EMS medical director’s authority over OUC’s clinical decisions explicit. I support that proposal. To carry it out, OUC needs clear instructions for reassessing a patient whose condition has worsened and for getting a supervisor involved when dispatch stalls. The medical director should review actual calls to see whether staff followed those instructions and whether the patient received the appropriate response. That is how the mayor and Council should judge the change.

Austin provides medical oversight across its emergency system. King County links the initial dispatch code to the patient’s eventual disposition, helping reviewers judge whether the response matched the need. OUC and the Fire and EMS medical director should make that comparison for D.C. calls and use the findings to revise training and dispatch instructions.

Singapore’s emergency service describes a cautious response when uncertainty remains, including sending an ambulance for assessment. That practice does not establish that Singapore’s entire system performs better, but it gives D.C. a specific policy to examine. The medical director should define when uncertainty warrants sending a crew and review those calls for missed emergencies and unnecessary dispatches. Call takers need clear instructions for protecting a patient when the person on the phone cannot fully explain what is wrong. A caller should not need the vocabulary of a doctor to get a response that could save a life.

2. Keeping enough trained people on each shift

The D.C. Auditor found that dispatchers averaged ten additional 40-hour weeks of overtime in fiscal year 2025; call takers averaged seven. OUC spent $3.8 million on overtime. Separately, the Inspector General found that 30 percent of scheduled shifts fell below minimum staffing between December 2024 and April 2025.

Figure 4. In fiscal 2025, dispatchers averaged the equivalent of ten extra 40-hour weeks of work; call takers averaged seven. Source: D.C. Auditor, July 2026.

That $3.8 million is a cost to taxpayers for work beyond employees’ regular schedules. Overtime can keep an essential position covered, but it is an expensive way to meet routine staffing needs. The inspection’s finding of understaffed shifts during part of the same fiscal year shows why spending alone is not enough. These reports do not establish that overtime caused dispatch failures or that outcomes worsened over time. They do show a city paying for extra hours while struggling to provide consistent coverage. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health warns that fatigue can impair attention and judgment, abilities a call taker needs throughout every shift.

The auditor’s payroll analysis estimated that one dispatch seat staffed around the clock requires roughly six employees, using fiscal 2025 regular hours. The analysis lacked training-hour data. OUC’s staffing plan must cover time spent in training and on leave, and allow for the months recruits need before working independently. The city should not build a life-or-death service around how many extra hours its employees can endure.

OUC’s public dashboard already reports shifts below target staffing. Add the number of qualified call takers, dispatchers and supervisors available for those shifts, alongside overtime and retention. Separate vacancies from approved leave and unexcused absences so managers can explain the shortages. The mayor and Council should fund the positions needed to cover the work, including time spent in training. Residents paying for that staff should be able to see whether each shift has enough people who can do the job.

Other cities offer options worth testing. Portland describes a common four-day, ten-hour schedule, protects scheduled days off from mandatory work, limits required workdays to twelve hours and pays full-time training coaches a 16 percent premium. Cincinnati describes paid training, peer support and career paths; Austin offers shift differentials and experience pay. These policies do not prove better retention, and OUC already has recruitment, training and wellness programs. The useful comparison is whether different schedules, protected time off or trainer incentives would help D.C. keep qualified staff.

OUC’s April budget testimony reported higher starting call-taker pay of $61,313 and a career ladder. The new director should find out why experienced employees leave and where applicants drop out, then work with employees and their representatives on changes that address those reasons. Track how many recruits finish training and remain a year later. Compare those results with shift coverage and overtime to see whether the higher pay is helping OUC keep enough trained staff.

3. Getting crews to the right location

On June 5, 2020, thirteen-year-old Maria called after her mother, Sheila Shepperd, collapsed. She repeated the Oglethorpe Street Northeast address three times. Help went to Northwest. WJLA reported a 21-minute wait for an ambulance. Sheila died.

Maria wondered whether she had given the wrong address. The recording eventually confirmed that she had supplied it correctly. A child who gives 911 the right address has done her part; the adults running the system must do theirs.

David Griffin drowned in the Washington Channel in March 2022 while paramedics awaited police assistance. The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that officers had not received an updated location. He had ten children. His case shows why dispatchers need confirmation that a crew received a corrected location.

OUC already trains its staff and reported a new supervisor curriculum in its April response to the Inspector General. Cases like these should be part of that training. Have supervisors work through conflicting locations and unacknowledged assignments, including calls from people who need interpreters, have hearing disabilities or cannot identify their location. When someone misses a critical step, provide further coaching and repeat the exercise. Attending a class should not be enough to establish that a supervisor can handle the call.

Address information already passes between Buildings and OUC, but the Inspector General found delays and called for better coordination. The two agencies should agree on how quickly a new address must appear in dispatch, with OCTO supporting the connection. OUC should track late updates and check that dispatchers can retrieve the addresses before an emergency occurs. During a response, dispatchers also need confirmation that crews received any corrected location. Both steps matter if help is to reach the person who called.

4. Dispatching through an outage

During an August 2, 2024 dispatch-system outage, a five-month-old boy died. Statter’s review of radio traffic found EMTs already treating him while the assigned paramedic unit remained occupied on another call. Roughly eleven minutes passed before discovery of the dispatch problem; paramedics arrived nearly 25 minutes after the initial call. The reporting does not establish whether earlier paramedic care would have saved him.

A parent performing CPR cannot wait for the city’s computers to come back online. An outage drill should recreate those conditions: the computer system fails, the assigned unit cannot respond and dispatch receives no acknowledgment. Staff should practice detecting the missed assignment and sending another crew while keeping track of urgent updates.

D.C. law already requires annual continuity exercises and after-action reviews. OUC reported an agency-wide exercise in March 2026; its fiscal year 2027 budget proposal also includes backup-power replacements. OUC and OCTO should publish the problems found in the exercise and the results of retesting after repairs, withholding sensitive security details. Before new software goes live, test it with dispatch staff and give a named official authority to delay installation if it fails. Residents need to know that the people taking their calls can keep working through an outage.

5. Measuring the wait for care

These accounts leave a question the city’s data should help answer: how often do calls go wrong? Individual cases cannot establish an error rate or tell us how D.C. compares with other cities. Residents need consistent measures to judge whether OUC has improved, including how long patients wait after someone answers the phone.

OUC already publishes call-answer and dispatch measures; Fire and EMS reports response times and patient outcomes. The agencies should bring those reports together so residents can follow the time from the first call to patient contact. Use the same definitions, separate calls by urgency and report long waits as well as typical ones. Where delays persist, the deputy mayor should identify the responsible agency and require it to explain what it is doing to shorten them. A call answered quickly can still leave someone waiting too long for care.

Chief John Donnelly’s February testimony said Fire and EMS was already working with DC Health, the hospital association and hospital leaders to reduce patient offload delays. The next mayor should ask those partners to set targets and report how long crews spend waiting to transfer patients. Progress would mean ambulances returning to service sooner, available for the next emergency.

London’s Clinical Hub offers a comparison for assessing patients and arranging care. D.C. already has its own Nurse Triage Line and Right Care Right Now services, with activity reporting. The administration should use available follow-up records to check whether referred patients received care and whether failed transfers led them to call 911 again, then publish the findings. A referral should get someone to treatment. Counting fewer ambulance trips does not tell us whether that happened.

6. Answers for families and follow-up on failures

The 2023 follow-up found uneven progress on the 2021 audit’s 31 recommendations. The Inspector General’s 2026 report also provides for follow-up. The next administration should put unfinished recommendations in one public record, crediting who raised them and naming the official responsible for each. Include deadlines and the results of any checks. If a revised procedure has not yet been tested, say so. Residents should be able to find out what happened to a recommendation without reading years of reports.

OUC’s April testimony said it fulfilled all agency-held records requests within legislated timeframes. Stephanie Clemans’s lawsuit concerned access to her son’s recordings. The published accounts do not establish that the testimony covers the same requests or period. OUC should report how long requests take and how often families receive the recordings they sought.

No parent should have to hire a lawyer to learn what happened after they called 911 for their child. D.C.’s records law already sets response deadlines, requires reasons for denial and provides recourse. OUC should honor those rights and give each family a staff contact who can explain the response and follow up on missing records. Report how long that takes, while protecting private information. A request may be closed in the agency’s records while a family still has questions no one has answered.

The D.C. Auditor recommended de-identified after-action reports within ten days in 2023. Pinto’s 2024 transparency proposal separately sought reports within 45 days after responses involving serious injury or death. OUC’s dashboard already lists reviewed concerns, causes and corrective actions. I would use the auditor’s ten-day deadline for an initial public account, stating what is known, what remains unanswered and when the review will be complete. The final report should name who will correct each failure and explain how an independent reviewer will check the work.

OUC says it began automated call reviews in December 2025. The Inspector General has also called for better analysis of recurring problems. Independent human reviewers should check a sample of calls against the software’s findings and report the errors it missed. OUC should then examine later calls to see whether employees repeated those mistakes after retraining. That would tell managers where the software helps and where they still need closer supervision.

Council members have pushed for change. Brooke Pinto advanced public reporting requirements and proposed greater disclosure after serious response errors. Christina Henderson tackled the staffing shortage through legislation allowing retired first responders to work at OUC without losing their pensions. Brianne Nadeau proposed restructuring emergency response and demanded more data, while Charles Allen’s committee examined stalled reforms in 2022.

Those efforts deserve credit, but more must be done. Council members should ask which fixes are overdue and examine the records behind OUC’s claims of improvement. It should not take another death to get their attention.

The first six months

In the first month, the mayor should appoint interim leadership and review the work already underway. Keep programs that are working. For unfinished recommendations, name the official responsible and set a deadline. Where OUC says a problem is fixed, have an independent reviewer check the records and test the procedure.

By day 90, publish the remaining work, what it will cost and any funding or legislation it needs. Use existing reports to establish the starting figures for later comparisons. Staffing and clinical supervision should come before optional technology pilots. Council can question missed deadlines in its existing hearings, with auditors checking the agency’s progress through follow-up reviews.

At six months, report what has changed. Explain any repeated errors and what remains unfinished. The deputy mayor should review progress monthly and resolve urgent disputes between agencies as they arise. Make those results available to residents so we can judge whether the administration is doing what it promised.

Any of us could need 911, whatever our income, neighborhood, background or politics. Neighborhood groups can put overdue recommendations on their agendas, and residents can press Council members for answers at oversight hearings. Acknowledge improvements; ask for an explanation when a deadline passes. Families who have spent years seeking answers should have the rest of us beside them.

I believe our grassroots, volunteer-led campaign helped keep basic city services in the public debate. Janeese Lewis George had pledged 911 reform during her campaign. My community joined Council members, auditors, reporters and families who had been pressing for change. Her administration now has to follow through, and those of us who raised this during the campaign should keep asking about it after the election.

Janeese Lewis George should start with 911. Hire an experienced director, provide the staff and authority the job requires, and check the results. D.C. residents already pay for this service. When someone calls because their child is choking or their parent has collapsed, they need the city to send the right help to the right place. Residents deserve evidence that help will arrive when they need it. No family should have to discover the next failure in the middle of an emergency.