As a frequent bike lane user, I can attest that D.C.’s 10 mph limit for scooters feels pokey. While privately-owned scooters zip along with the rest of us, the DDOT-permitted shared fleets clog up the bike lane, forcing cyclists into traffic to pass. Pedestrians seem to be even more incensed by the scooters, objecting not only to sharing sidewalk space with riders but to the obstacles that parked scooters represent–a concern that is particularly acute for residents with limited mobility or vision.

Our 10 mph limit is atypical. New York, Portland, Seattle, Austin, and Chicago all set a base of 15 mph, with various exceptions. Even Helsinki’s post-reform daytime speed (more on that below) is higher than D.C.’s. As far as I can tell, our e-scooter speed limit is the lowest of any comparable city.

Electric Scooters Are Dangerous

The motivation for the low speed limit isn’t hard to understand. The CPSC estimates that e-Scooter-caused emergency department visits increased 7.5x from 2017 to 2024.

D.C.’s crash data is messy: I don’t see a great way to separate e-scooters from gas scooters, including the pandemic-era boom of delivery drivers. I’ve included Claude’s best effort to clean it up–at the very least, there’s no indication that D.C. is an outlier from the trend the CPSC identified.

D.C. Scooter-Rider Crash Involvement by Quarter and Injury Severity

Although the severity of scooter-related injuries is generally comparable to bikes, the rate of injury is much higher. Estimates of the vehicles’ rate of injuries-per-vehicle-mile-traveled vary, but consistently mark e-scooters as among the most dangerous ways to get around. A 2020 analysis of data in Austin estimated that e-scooters generated between 175 and 200 times as many injuries per mile as cars. And a study here in D.C. showed that scooters lead to emergency department visits about three times as frequently as bikes on a per-mile basis.

D.C. Scooter Injuries Happen on the Sidewalk Weirdly Often

That same study showed that 57% of D.C. scooter-related emergency department visits happened because of an accident on the sidewalk. That’s unusual. Austin’s data has 33% of accidents occurring on the sidewalk. The nationwide CPSC study found that 32% of accidents happened on the sidewalk. This supports the idea that our unusually low speed limit is pushing riders away from roads and onto sidewalks, which may cause an outsize amount of pedestrian annoyance.

Does that mean more pedestrian injuries, too? Probably not, or at least not many. I couldn’t find much on scooter/pedestrian interactions, but Chicago’s e-Scooter Pilot Evaluation found just 10 pedestrians treated in emergency departments across 821,615 trips — about 1.2 per 100,000, versus the 23.4 per 100,000 it reports for riders. The pedestrian injury rate seems to be dwarfed by the injuries that riders suffer.

Sidewalk Detection Works and Changes Behavior

I was initially skeptical of the plan to vary speed limits between sidewalks and streets. Normal GPS systems can’t reliably provide that level of precision. But to my considerable surprise, the technology to enable scooters to detect whether they’re being ridden on the sidewalk or road has already been deployed by Spin in Santa Monica, achieving apparently-satisfactory sidewalk detection through a mixture of GPS, accelerometers, and cameras. Better still, Santa Monica did this work using an experimental setup designed to test its impact on user behavior.

Normally, when one of Santa Monica’s Spin scooters detected it was being ridden on the sidewalk it would beep, send a push notification to the rider’s phone, and reduce its maximum speed. During the experiment these mechanisms were disabled for half of an experimental fleet of 100 scooters. The scooters for which the feedback mechanisms remained active recorded 22% less time and 26% less distance spent on sidewalks, and 5% more time and 8% more distance on streets (though the last of these did not achieve statistical significance). Both groups used bike lanes about the same amount.

These are modest changes, but the study authors note that most trips begin and end on sidewalks by necessity because that’s where scooters are parked, which may make the effect on rider behavior seem more slight than it otherwise would be.

Speed and Availability Restrictions Lower Injury Rates

It’s worth understanding the cause of those gigantic injury numbers I cited above. In study after study, the causes of scooter injuries are dominated by inexperienced riders suffering falls. The share of first-time riders is particularly striking: 33% of the injuries in the Austin study arose during the victim’s very first ride. It was 36% in the D.C. study! Scooter injuries are also disproportionately associated with alcohol and off-peak use.

That combination is why Helsinki structured its scooter reforms the way it did: reducing top speeds to 12.5 mph normally, to 9.3 mph after midnight, and disabling scooter rentals after midnight entirely on Friday and Saturday nights. After this change the city’s per-trip injury rate was cut by more than half.

Do We Want to Push Scooter Riders into the Street?

Santa Monica’s example suggests that we can use technology to nudge scooter riders off the sidewalk. What would happen next?

No one has measured injury rates by street versus sidewalk. That would require knowing how many scooter-miles are ridden on sidewalks versus roads, and nobody tracks that comprehensively. But there is evidence that the injuries that happen in the street are more severe.

It doesn’t take a genius to guess why. Amidst all the bad news about scooter injuries, one element is relatively scarce: cars. A 2025 Rutgers study found that 23% of e-scooter injuries involved a car, versus 33% for e-bikes. In the D.C. study, just 12% of the studied scooter injuries involved an automobile, versus 67% being chalked up to infrastructure or “other fall”. It seems reasonable to ask if that balance would change if D.C. riders spent more time in the street.

Who Would We be Pushing into the Street?

We can move scooter-riding into the street by increasing speed. The increase in speed will mean more injuries, and the move off the sidewalk will mean more serious ones, likely because more cars will be involved. Who would be suffering these injuries?

The Rutgers study provides an answer, illustrated below: mostly younger people. The study also confirms that the involvement of cars correlates with the injured person being admitted to the hospital.

Changing the scooter injury mix in this way could be particularly unfortunate given the dismal rate of helmet use seen in the literature. The D.C. study showed less than 2% of injured scooter riders were wearing a helmet, versus 66% of cyclists. Here I should note that the D.C. study only looked at injuries among people who were at least 18 years old–that’s also the age that Hopp and Lime require of riders, though if you’ve been outside in D.C. at all in the last eight years, you know that younger kids ride their scooters frequently.

Studies examining youth scooter use seem to exist in a separate epidemiological world, but there’s evidence that e-scooter injuries are accruing to Black and Hispanic youth, and especially boys, at disproportionate rates. That reality sits uneasily alongside DDOT’s celebration of 11% of D.C. micromobility rides being taken under the program’s subsidy for low-income participants.

What Does This Add Up To?

D.C.’s scooter program is unusual: it’s got a very low speed limit, which encourages sidewalk riding. That probably keeps injuries lower than they otherwise would be. And that’s good, because scooters are a dangerous way to get around on an injuries-per-mile basis. Sure, bike statistics benefit from bigger denominators: higher speeds and subpopulations with longer commutes; plus a culture of ingrained helmet use. But even discounting that, scooters seem like a kind-of-lousy transportation mode that hurts a lot of new riders, reckless kids, and people coming home from a night out, when they probably shouldn’t be driving a vehicle.

DDOT can nudge riders off of the sidewalk with a speed boost. And it’s not crazy to set a top speed more in line with what other cities use. But that increase in speed will mean more injuries for riders. And the move off sidewalks is likely to make those injuries more severe.

D.C. should try to limit the damage with policies that have worked elsewhere: limiting speeds not only based on where the vehicle is ridden but when, focusing on nightlife hours and first rides. Cities like Austin, Seattle, Helsinki, and Chicago have implemented bits and pieces of these measures. D.C. should grab as many good ideas as we can. Right now, DDOT’s proposed rule doesn’t include any provisions targeting first rides or nightlife hours.

(Of course, to know if it’s someone’s first ride, you have to be sure the person riding the scooter is the same one who’s signed into the app. But that’s a topic for another post.)

There’s Still Time To Weigh In

DDOT will be accepting comments on this 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.

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Today, we’ll examine how DCHA’s citywide payment standards compare with rents across neighborhoods, why “rent-reasonableness” reviews are so important, and how they have fallen short.

Every year, the District sets payment standards to calculate housing assistance for voucher holders. For fiscal 2026, the DCHA board approved standards at 187% of HUD’s Fair Market Rent—up to $4,200 a month for a two-bedroom, $5,301 for a three-bedroom, and more for larger units. The figure is identical across the city. A two-bedroom in Dupont Circle and a two-bedroom in Congress Heights are subject to the same $4,200 payment standard. As all Washingtonians know, rents do not work that way.

This does not mean DCHA automatically pays a landlord the maximum. The approved rent must also pass a rent-reasonableness review, and the household typically pays part of the rent—generally 30% of their income. Nonetheless, the payment standard establishes how much subsidy may be available and gives landlords a target. The gap between the citywide payment standard and actual rents creates room for taxpayer money to be misspent when the review is not done properly.

[Figure 1 · How the payment standard and rent-reasonableness test interact]

HUD’s Fair Market Rent is generally set at the 40th percentile of recent rents for standard-quality units occupied by recent movers and includes utilities. This is a modest benchmark. For a D.C. two-bedroom in 2026, the benchmark underlying DCHA’s schedule is about $2,246. DCHA then multiplies this figure by 1.87. The result, $4,200, sits 87% above HUD’s benchmark and well above many neighborhood rent estimates.

In more affordable neighborhoods, the rent-reasonableness review should set a rent at an appropriate level for the neighborhood, but whether it does in practice depends on DCHA.

Before approving a lease or an increase in rent, the housing authority must compare the unit with similar unassisted apartments—considering a range of factors, including location, size, type, age, quality, amenities and condition. Federal rules bar approval of a rent that exceeds the reasonable rent for comparable units.

The Gap Between Market Rent and DCHA’s Payment Standard

Because the payment standard is flat, the gap between market rent and payment standard varies significantly.

DCHA Payment Standard vs. Typical Market Rent

[Figure 2 · The gap by ward between typical market rent for a two bedroom and the payment standard. Market rents are mid-2026 listing aggregates and are approximate. Figures compare advertised rent with the two-bedroom payment standard.]

East of the Anacostia, where listing sources place a typical advertised two-bedroom at roughly $1,600, the flat $4,200 payment standard sits about $2,600 a month—nearly $31,000 a year—above the going listing rent. In upper Northwest, where advertised rents are considerably higher, the gap is smaller. The estimated gap is largest in Wards 7 and 8.

DCHA Payment Standards Compared with HUD Rent Benchmarks

Measured against HUD’s own Small Area Fair Market Rents—the federal government’s ZIP-code-level estimate—the flat standard also leaves large potential gaps in many ZIP codes.

DCHA Payment Standard vs. HUD Zip Code Benchmarks

[Figure 3 · The gap against HUD’s ZIP-code benchmark. SAFMR is HUD’s ZIP-level 40th-percentile gross-rent estimate, including utilities. The chart uses FY2024 SAFMRs so provides historical context rather than the current gap today.]

When HUD assessed DCHA in 2022, it found that the agency could not clearly document how it determined reasonable rents for individual units. Across a sweeping review, HUD reported concerns that DCHA was not following its local procedures and that landlords were exploiting the resulting weakness.

Rather than documenting unit-level comparisons, DCHA relied on neighborhood averages—obscuring differences on the same block or within the same neighborhood. DCHA was directed to go back and analyze new admissions and rent increases and reimburse the federal government if the review showed overpayments.

The results of the federal review were no surprise. As the Washington Post reported, as early as 2021, a member of DCHA’s own board flagged this issue. One director departed before fixing it. His successor first promised to finish the job, but then reversed course and floated raising the payment standard. Board members objected observing that landlords treat the published standard as the asking price.

The sum of money at stake is significant. In 2022, DCHA administered roughly 16,000 federal and locally funded tenant-based vouchers combined. Just $100 in average monthly overpayment across 10,000 units would cost $12 million a year.

DCHA has since begun using third-party software to conduct unit-by-unit rent-reasonableness assessments, but serious concerns remain about how the process works in practice. From what commissioners have observed through ANC work, some landlords request and receive the maximum even when nearby unassisted rents suggest that a lower amount may be warranted.

My colleagues in ANC 4B recently passed a resolution raising concerns about rent-reasonableness determinations at several properties in the commission area and urging stronger DCHA and Council oversight. The resolution also raises concerns that some landlords have partitioned rooms to add very small bedrooms and increase the applicable payment standard. DCHA should investigate those claims and verify that units comply with all requirements.

To her credit, Janeese Lewis George has pledged to reform DCHA and overhaul the voucher system to address ongoing overpayments. Following through would be a significant progress.

The current voucher waiting list is closed, and tens of thousands of people have waited for assistance. The District government must do more to ensure limited federal and local voucher dollars are well spent.

Sources & Notes

Payment standards: DCHA Housing Choice Voucher Payment Standard Schedule, FY2026 (approved Oct. 8, 2025), set at 187% of FMR. DCHA lists $4,200 for a two-bedroom and describes the figures as maximum payment standards, while noting that they do not establish the value of a voucher.

Federal rules: 24 C.F.R. §§ 982.503 and 982.507 distinguish the payment standard from the rent-reasonableness determination. Rent reasonableness must be based on comparable unassisted units and relevant unit characteristics.

Benchmarks: HUD FY2026 Fair Market Rents. The $4,200 two-bedroom standard equals approximately $2,246 × 1.87. FMR and SAFMR figures are gross-rent estimates that include tenant-paid utilities; advertised listing rents may not.

Market rents: Listing-aggregate medians (RentHop, Zumper, Apartments.com and RentCafe), mid-2026, using one representative neighborhood per ward: W1 Columbia Heights, W2 Dupont Circle, W3 Cleveland Park, W4 Petworth, W5 Brookland, W6 Capitol Hill, W7 Deanwood and W8 Congress Heights. Because source methodologies differ and neighborhoods do not represent entire wards, the figure should be described as illustrative—not a ward-level market-rent estimate. Archive each underlying result and access date before publication.

HUD SAFMR (Figure 3): Use HUD FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents for the selected ZIP codes if comparing them with the FY2026 DCHA standard: W1 20010, W2 20036, W3 20008, W4 20011, W5 20017, W6 20003, W7 20019 and W8 20032. Do not mix FY2024 SAFMRs with the FY2026 payment standard in the same “current gap” calculation.

Oversight and rent reasonableness: HUD, “District of Columbia Housing Authority (DC001) Assessment,” 2022; DCHA’s description of its post-2023 rent-review process; reporting and analysis by the Washington Post, Greater Greater Washington, the Equal Rights Center, Legal Aid DC and Street Sense Media.

Talk to almost any housing developer in this city—as I do through my ANC work—and they will tell you that interest in investing in the District is almost nonexistent. To be sure, broader economic forces like remote work and DOGE are major contributors to this crisis, but much of the current state of affairs is self-inflicted. After all, Northern Virginia has been affected by the same forces, yet housing construction there is booming.

At Capital Commonsense, we’re kicking off a long series of articles examining the many decisions by the DC Council, Mayor Muriel Bowser, and DC Superior Court that helped break our housing ecosystem.

Our hope is that the incoming mayor, Janeese Lewis George, learns from the string of often well-intentioned decisions that has produced major unintended consequences—and addresses the fallout. She has pledged to build 72,000 units of new housing. Not only is that goal a fantasy in the current environment, but thousands of existing affordable units are at risk of being lost after a decade of bad policymaking.

Mayor Lewis George has the opportunity to take office next January with a reset: Landlords will be held accountable. Tenants will pay rent. And the District will make it less burdensome to build, operate, and maintain housing, while respecting tenants’ rights.

We’re starting our series with a look at one building already in a death spiral—and what its collapse portends for the rest of the District’s affordable housing stock.

Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s complaint, filed last week, reveals deplorable conditions at the Delta Pearl, a 10-story affordable-housing building at 1400 Florida Avenue NE.

The building’s air conditioning system died on July 1 and was never fixed, leaving families and seniors to bake through the hottest weeks of the summer. Both elevators also broke in July, forcing parents to carry children up the stairs and residents with health issues to climb them—stairs covered with feces, urine, and debris. The exterior gate had been broken since August 2025 and the key-fob entry system since February, leaving the building to contend with a growing squatter problem.

Add exposed wiring, nonfunctioning fire-safety equipment, rodents, roaches, water damage, and unaddressed fire damage, and you get nearly 200 open housing-code violations that drove this lawsuit.

Schwalb’s office is asking the court for an emergency order compelling the most urgent repairs, a broader injunction, restitution for tenants, and civil penalties against owner-developer Buwa Binitie and his companies, Delta 2 Owner LLC and Faria Management.

Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, who helped cut the ribbon on the renovated building, said the decline was impossible to reconcile with what he had seen two years earlier. He also noted that his office had spent months escalating residents’ complaints to District agencies before the suit.

He is right to be angry—but his anger elides the role the Council itself has played in breaking our housing system and then failing to repair it—allowing buildings like the Delta Pearl to reach this point.

Binitie’s response to the lawsuit is not really a defense of the conditions—he concedes they are serious—so much as an explanation of the math behind them. His management group says roughly two-thirds of Delta Pearl’s tenants are behind on rent, that the property is carrying more than $1.8 million in unpaid rent and resident balances, and that it has lost more than $1 million this year alone. On July 30, according to the complaint, Binitie told the District he simply did not have the resources to fix the building and intended to begin relocating tenants.

To be clear, tenants who are not currently paying rent may be legally entitled to withhold it because of the current deplorable conditions and failure to make repairs—and we will learn more about the specifics through additional court filings. But it is easy to see how this situation could spiral out of control.

If 10, 20, or 30 percent of tenants stopped paying rent, at some point the Delta Pearl stopped generating enough revenue to be adequately maintained—margins are thin in affordable housing. The landlord could not or would not make repairs. Tenants who were paying rent—and had the ability to leave—moved out and were not replaced. The share of nonpaying tenants grew. The financial picture got worse and more problems went unaddressed. And on and on it went until the building reached the state it is in today.

That is a death spiral—and the Delta Pearl is not the only building caught in one.

Head over to Eckington and you find the Gale, a 603-unit complex where more than half the apartments are affordable. There, a blind tenant who uses a wheelchair went four months without the elevator nearest her apartment, forcing her to navigate three long corridors just to get outside.

The Gale has racked up more than 250 building violations since 2023 and more than $185,000 in fines, of which its owners had paid just 7 percent as of this spring. Residents describe mold, pests, break-ins, foul odors, billing errors, and management that either delays repairs or simply does not respond.

The “solution” now on the table is telling. Parker has proposed a $21 million, 10-year tax abatement—at a time of intense fiscal pressure for the District—to pull the Gale out of what even he acknowledges is a death spiral. The break would kick in only if the owners first fix the building’s problems. The Gale’s ownership blames the same forces Binitie does. In testimony before the Council, a representative said rising costs, tax burdens, and income lost to rent nonpayment had pushed the property into deficit.

The pandemic and the emergency tenant protections that followed stretched eviction cases to a year and a half or longer, while rent collections in the District fell to lows unmatched anywhere in the region. The city was projecting roughly $147 million in unpaid rent for a single year, and DC now posts the highest rent-nonpayment rates in the country for low-income housing tax-credit buildings, as GreaterGreaterWashington detailed in a highly informative June piece.

The RENTAL Act the Council passed last year—speeding up nonpayment cases—was an attempt to rebalance the system. But as we will discuss in future posts, we are still nowhere near the 2019 status quo.

All of this brings us back to the opportunity ahead. Janeese Lewis George inherits a housing system damaged by pandemic-era policy choices and years of failing to grapple with their consequences. She also inherits a genuine mandate for change and a rare opportunity for the reset desperately needed to preserve existing housing and get new housing built.

Doing so will require moving away from the positions she took on the Council and resisting pressure from many campaign supporters who want to go even further on the policies that have helped choke off housing development. But if she is serious about restarting investment and stabilizing the District’s housing system, she will have to push back.

Landlords maintaining their buildings and tenants paying their rent should be basic expectations in a functioning housing system. The Delta Pearl is a cautionary tale about what happens when those fundamentals break down and buildings are allowed to descend into chaos.

While it is easy to pin all the blame for this unfolding disaster on bad housing operators and greedy landlords, we see at the Delta Pearl and the Gale that those who are hurt the most by the status quo are the most vulnerable tenants who are unable to relocate and must endure increasingly deplorable conditions.

Our next mayor has a rare chance to build a system that prevents a dozen more Delta Pearls. She should take it.

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The standard source for budgetary comparisons between the states is the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances (ASLGF). It includes consolidated state and local numbers, which is essential for any comparison involving DC. For fiscal year 2024, the most recent year available, the survey puts federal aid at $8.1 billion, or 38% of the District’s general revenue.1 That headline number is higher than any state’s consolidated share: it exceeds Alaska’s and Kentucky’s by more than a percentage point. The national average sits just below 25%.

To get from the headline number to a like-for-like comparison involves first making two straightforward adjustments to the ASLGF numbers, and then thinking about a counterfactual world in which DC loses its criminal justice subsidy and higher Medicaid matching rate, but gains the ability to tax income and property the way any of the states can.

The first wrinkle is that the ASLGF allocates all of the federal funding received by WMATA to the District’s consolidated revenue. But WMATA is a regional compact involving Maryland and Virginia in addition to the District. If we use WMATA’s subsidy formula to attribute the federal funding to the three jurisdictions, DC’s share drops from roughly $1 billion to about $370 million. This moves DC’s federal share down to 36.2% and to third place, now behind Alaska and Kentucky.

The second wrinkle runs in the opposite direction. Congress shifted much of the criminal justice system onto the federal budget in the 1997 Revitalization Act. Funding for those functions is therefore not included in the ASLGF. The states are themselves responsible for funding these activities, and I include the funds in the District’s consolidated revenue to move closer to a clean comparison. The funds involved are significant (some $780 million in FY 20242) and move DC back to first place at 38.5%.3

Now let’s think about the counterfactual in which DC is treated like all other states. This would affect both federal funding and own-source revenue.

First, federal funding. DC would have to pay for its own criminal justice system: the $780 million we just added in comes back out. And DC’s Medicaid program would be treated like that of any state. DC would lose its special Medicaid matching rate or Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP). As I will discuss in more detail in the next post, the federal government picks up 70 percent of the bill for DC’s “regular” Medicaid spending.4 If DC were a state, that rate would be 50 percent, costing DC about $680 million. Removing both of these federal subsidies would lower DC’s federal revenue share to 31.6 percent, ninth place, between Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Second, own-source revenue. There are two major sources of revenue that the states can rely on and DC cannot. The first is taxes levied on the incomes of people who work in DC but live elsewhere. As the urban heart of a major metropolitan area, DC would be able to dramatically increase its income tax revenue if it were allowed to tax these workers. Based on the American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, nonresident DC-source wages in 2024 amounted to almost exactly $50 billion. The forty or so states that tax wages all tax such income at their ordinary income tax rates, and the workers receives a tax credit from their home states. If we apply DC income tax rates to these wages, revenue comes to about $3.2 billion.

That estimate requires two adjustments that run in opposite directions. Some DC residents commute out to Maryland and Virginia, and in our counterfactual DC would have to credit them for taxes paid there, which costs about $400 million. But the ACS also underestimates wages: it puts total wages earned in DC at $84 billion against $97 billion in the BEA’s place-of-work series, and scaling by that ratio raises the nonresident base to about $58 billion.5 A reasonable estimate that accounts for both changes is that DC would be able to net some $3.3 billion in additional income tax. This would lower the federal share of DC’s general revenue to about 27.4%. DC falls to twenty-fourth place, just above North Carolina.

The second is the property tax. Much more of DC’s real property is owned by the federal government and foreign governments than is the case for the states, dramatically reducing its ability to collect property tax revenue. DC collected $2.95 billion in real property tax in FY 2024 and exempted $2.20 billion. Federal property alone accounted for $1.22 billion of the exempt total, with embassies and international organizations costing DC another $140 million. Of course no state can tax federal property either. But while federal property constitutes 23.7% of the potential property tax base in DC, that number is almost certainly in the low single digits for other states. If we count only the federal excess over 5 percent of the total potential property tax base, along with the embassies and international organizations, DC’s forgone property tax revenue still comes to $1.1 billion. Adding it to own-source revenue brings the federal share to 26.2 percent and takes DC to twenty-sixth place, just below New York.

Now, there are elements of this exercise that some may quibble with—it holds wages, rents, employment, and other jurisdictions’ tax rates fixed, for example—but the overall picture is clear. DC’s federal revenue share looks larger than it really is because DC does not have access to the tax instruments other states use. Its total revenue (federal plus own-source) would be greater if it lost its subsidies but gained tax autonomy. To add insult to injury, much of the funding it receives in lieu of tax autonomy comes with serious strings attached. That much of this funding is routed through the Medicaid program is an example of that, and the one that I will focus on in my next post.

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At the career-ready benchmark (CAPE 3+), six in 10 students met the standard in English language arts this spring, up from 58 percent a year ago. In math, 51 percent cleared the bar, up from 48 percent. Since 2022, the first year of testing after the pandemic closure, the share of students on track for career readiness climbed 8 points in reading and 10 points in math. DC schools also posted a reduction (-3.3%) in the percent of students furthest behind (Level 1) in math, the largest single-year decrease in Level 1 students in the PARCC/CAPE era.

This blog post delves into where DC’s students are improving academically and where we have more work to do to reach and exceed pre-pandemic levels of learning. This year’s results give us reasons to celebrate, and they should sharpen our sense of urgency to continue the hard work to further accelerate outcomes for all students. Three themes stand out in the data:

• Achievement gaps narrowed and student poverty is less predictive of school performance in math and reading. In fact, the correlation between socioeconomic status of a school’s student body and its proficiency rate is the lowest in DC state test history. Yet, differences in performance between student groups remain stark, requiring continued urgency from adults and focus on equitable distribution of resources to support priority student groups.

• Cohorts of students in grades 3-8 from 2022 to 2026 show stronger annual proficiency gains across five post-pandemic test administrations than similarly aged students’ pre-pandemic, five-year trend in ELA and math. Overall, annual statewide gains in math are stronger post-pandemic than pre-pandemic. ELA results show similar improvement to pre-pandemic trends even though post-pandemic proficiency rates started higher than where DC students achieved back in 2015. We also compare the progress of two cohorts of economically disadvantaged students, those in 3^rd and 4^th grade in 2022 with those in 3^rd and 4^th grade in 2015, across five years. Improvement in annual cohort gains indicate that our educational system is likely stronger now than it was pre-pandemic.

• Students who perform at Level 1 on CAPE are typically multiple grade levels behind their peers. In 2026, there were 1,500 fewer students scoring at Level 1 in math, a historic single-year 13% decrease in the number of students furthest behind. The percentage of students at Level 1 in ELA dropped to the second lowest level since computer-based testing began in 2015.

Let’s dig in.

The share of students achieving Level 3+ on CAPE helps us understand how public schools are recovering post-COVID

State officials typically headline the share of students who meet or exceed grade-level expectations, a standard known as Level 4 (meeting or exceeding expectations) that signals students are on track for readiness at selective colleges. All students deserve the opportunity to graduate high school and compete for selective college admissions, the standard that CAPE 4+ represents. We also know every student needs adequate command of English and math to succeed in life regardless of postsecondary pathway, the standard that CAPE 3+ more closely represents and what educators most often correlate with being “on grade level.” In fact, the test developers originally called PARCC Level 3 “Adequate Command of Content“ to reflect career-ready expectations.

The pandemic hit the 3+ benchmark hardest. Proficiency rates fell further at 3+ than at 4+, and achievement gaps widened more at 3+ than at 4+. Monitoring both benchmarks, along with the percent of students at Level 1, lets us track whether all students improve, not only our higher performers.

Longitudinal math gains post-pandemic outpace the pre-pandemic trend

Between 2015 and 2019, the District earned a national reputation as one of the fastest-improving urban school systems in the country. The 2026 results show that the five-year, post-pandemic recovery in math demonstrated greater improvement than the five-year, pre-pandemic trend in nearly every grade. Statewide, the share of students at the career-ready benchmark in math rose 10 points over the past four years, compared with 7 points over four years before the pandemic. The grades that fell furthest in 2022 have recovered fastest. Third grade, which dropped 21 points after returning from school closures and virtual learning, regained 16 points. Seventh grade, which dropped the least, gained the least.

The same pattern holds for student groups. Economically disadvantaged students, who lost the most ground during the pandemic, produced annual gains at nearly twice the pre-pandemic pace. English learners recorded their largest single-year math gain of the recovery this spring.

ELA gains continue at a similar pace, and every student group now exceeds 2019 performance levels

The pandemic’s negative impact on reading achievement was about half the magnitude of math, and gains since 2022 closely tracked the pre-pandemic pace in most grades despite starting at higher levels. Steady annual improvement means that for most grades and student groups, performance now exceeds pre-pandemic rates.

Fewer students score at Level 1 on CAPE

The share of students scoring at the lowest performance level—an often-overlooked measure—shows the depth and pace of academic recovery among students who are furthest behind. Students who score Level 1 in math, the lowest of five performance levels, are typically more than one grade behind. The share of economically disadvantaged students scoring Level 1 fell 4.6 points this year to 30.7 percent. That is the largest single-year decline in more than a decade of data; however, the rate remains 4 points higher than where it stood in 2019. At the current pace, the city will pass its pre-pandemic low next year. Across all students in math, nearly 1,500 fewer students in grades 3-10 posted a score that indicates they were multiple grade levels behind in math last year. In reading, there were nearly 1,000 fewer students at Level 1 than last year.

Economically disadvantaged cohort gains indicate a stronger system

Washington’s rapid demographic change raises an obvious question about its rising test scores: Are the schools improving, or is the student body simply changing? Over the past decade the District grew wealthier, and a rising proficiency rate for “all students” could, in theory, reflect who moved in rather than improvement in school performance. One way to answer it is to set the citywide numbers aside and follow a single group: economically disadvantaged students—those whose families qualify for public assistance, face homelessness, or are in the foster care system—who account for roughly half of DC’s tested population.

In this analysis, we follow two cohorts of economically disadvantaged students who sat in third and fourth grades in 2022 through seventh and eighth grade in 2026, pairing them with economically disadvantaged third and fourth grade students in 2015 through the seventh and eighth grades in 2019. This analysis has limits because the cohorts track grade levels, not individually matched children, and families move in and out of the District each year.

Consider math first. Before the pandemic, students tended to lose ground on average as they aged. The 2015 third graders started with 42 percent at the career-ready benchmark and finished seventh grade at 41 percent; the 2015 fourth graders slid from 38 percent to 27 percent by eighth grade. That pattern, a slow erosion of math proficiency from elementary school into middle school, prevailed in the District, as in many cities.

The pandemic cohorts started far behind those benchmarks, 15 points behind in both cases, a measure of how much the virtual year and a half cost the city’s poorest children. The 2022 third graders climbed from 27 percent to 37 percent over four years, a gain of 10 points on a path where their pre-pandemic peers lost one, and the 2022 fourth graders gained 4 points compared with their predecessors who lost 11.

Reading tells the same story with a stronger ending. Both pandemic cohorts started 3 points behind their pre-pandemic counterparts and finished ahead: the 2022 third graders by 4 points as seventh graders, the 2022 fourth graders by 9 points as eighth graders. Fifty-five percent of economically disadvantaged eighth graders now read at the career-ready benchmark, compared with 46 percent for the matched group in 2019. Over four years, the newer cohorts grew by 31 and 23 points; the older ones grew by 24 and 11.

What changed between 2015 and 2022? The District trained thousands of teachers in structured literacy, built a high-impact tutoring program that reached more than 4,700 students last year, and directed additional funding to the schools serving the highest concentrations of poverty. The cohort results suggest those investments work.

Students in pre-k and kindergarten during the COVID virtual year are not progressing as quickly as older peers

The strong recovery picture looks different for the city’s youngest test takers. Last year’s upper elementary students were in PK3, PK4, and kindergarten during the virtual year, missing out on critical in-person experiences that build early number sense, vocabulary, and classroom routines. In math, third grade sits 5 points below where third graders in 2019 performed, and fourth grade sits 7 points below. Among economically disadvantaged students, the shortfall grows to 9 and 10 points. Grades 6 and above, by contrast, sit within 2 points of 2019 in math and above 2019 proficiency rates in reading.

Early numeracy deserves the same citywide focus that structured literacy received, and the Capital Math Collective, a $20 million public-private partnership built on the Math Task Force recommendations, arrived at the right moment. High-impact tutoring, teacher training in evidence-based math practices, and family engagement in math activities outside of class will help continue moving the numeracy needle forward.

Equitable progress continues with narrowed gaps, shrinking correlation between school poverty and performance

Achievement gaps at the career-ready benchmark narrowed for most student groups since 2022, for most groups since 2022, a direct result of the students who fell furthest gaining the fastest. The gap between Black and White students at the career-ready benchmark in math fell 6 points, to 54, and the gap between Hispanic and White students also fell 6 points, to 42. In reading, the Black-White gap fell 6 points to 44. Those gaps remain wide, and two grew: the math gap for students with disabilities and the reading gap for English learners.

The nonprofit I run, EmpowerK12, also tracks how much a school’s poverty level predicts its results. A weaker relationship indicates that more schools serving high-poverty communities produce strong outcomes. In 2022, the share of economically disadvantaged students a school served explained nearly three-quarters of the variation in school proficiency rates. That figure has fallen every year since and now sits at 53 percent, below the previous record low in 2016. For economically disadvantaged students themselves, school poverty now explains about a tenth of the variation in their results, the lowest figure in any year of the analysis.

Whittier Elementary in Ward 4 is a particular stand-out this year for the results of economically disadvantaged students. More than half of economically disadvantaged students at Whittier (54%) achieved at the college-ready (4+) benchmark—outperforming the proficiency rate of economically disadvantaged students in DC’s selective-enrollment schools—and nine in ten economically disadvantaged students met the career-ready (3+) benchmark, which is higher than the average proficiency rate of all students in Ward 3, the city’s most affluent.

It’s worth noting that DC’s per-pupil funding formula is considered one of the more progressive in the country, due to providing a high funding weight—calculated as a percentage of the base weight that all students receive—for high-need students. Mayors Gray and Bowser and the DC Council have all taken specific actions to make DC’s approach to school funding more equitable over the last decade and a half—by adding the funding weight for at-risk students, increasing the base above the inflation rate, and adding a new weight for schools serving high concentrations of at-risk students.

The path forward

The 2026 results confirm that many of the District’s strategies work, and the task at hand is scale and maintaining focus.

Continue scaling what works, including classroom instructional supports and high-impact tutoring. OSSE served more than 4,700 students and CitySchools Collaborative reached 12,610 students through high-impact tutoring (HIT) in 2025-26, with 69% of those students from economically disadvantaged families and a majority with baseline test scores in the bottom quartile. OSSE analysis found that students who received at least 20 hours of tutoring in reading saw more favorable score changes across grade bands. In math, our own research found that DCPS and public charter students who met high-impact tutoring dosage levels demonstrated an additional 59 instructional days of growth compared with peers who started the fall at the same performance level and did not receive HIT. Stanford researchers also found that DC students were more likely to attend school on days they were scheduled for tutoring. Thousands more students need access to HIT to help them get more at bats and catch up with their peers.

Bring structured literacy’s playbook to early numeracy. The District trained thousands of educators in the science of reading, and ELA recovery followed. A similar initiative is needed for math. DCPS has demonstrated strong improvement in math proficiency, especially at elementary schools East of the River, by taking a coherent approach to training everyone in evidence-based math instruction training from instructional superintendents to principals to teachers. In early elementary classrooms across DCPS, math instruction and intervention blocks follow a standard protocol informed by research and the Eureka Math Squared curriculum. Teachers and aides target intervention and small group coaching based on how students perform on daily lessons and weekly math skills assessments.

The Capital Math Collective, a privately funded $20 million citywide initiative, helps DCPS scale teacher support and provides more than $2 million in grants to 23 charter schools for similar professional development and instructional coaching for math teachers. After year one, of the two-year grant, DCPS and charter school grantees outgained non-grantees in math 3+ proficiency from the prior year, 3.6 percentage points for grantees to 1.2 points for non-grantees, a statistically significant difference (p<0.01).

DC should ensure all DCPS and public charter schools have access to evidence-based math instructional strategies by developing a robust math instructional leader network, either within a government agency like OSSE or by adding government funds to public-private partnerships like the Capital Math Collective.

Maintain investment levels. The equitable funding formula and the investments in tutoring and teacher development created this momentum, and sustained funding will carry it forward.

Four years of post-pandemic gains have shown what DC’s public schools can do when citywide strategy, funding, and instruction pull in the same direction—the next four will show if our public officials want to continue and accelerate that progress.

Explore the complete 2026 DC CAPE results through EmpowerK12’s data dashboard to learn more about how your child’s school or neighborhood school performed. Also, save the date for EmpowerK12’s forthcoming 10^th Anniversary celebration of Bold Performance Schools and release of our annual report about what works in our city’s best schools at the end of October.

D.C. cannot afford to keep treating small-business survival as a private problem for entrepreneurs to solve alone.

A new establishment in the District faces the worst first-year survival odds in the country. A recent analysis of federal data found that nearly one-third of new private-sector establishments in D.C. close within a year. After five years, 57 percent have closed. After ten years, that figure reaches 72 percent.

The restaurant industry puts faces and names to those numbers. D.C. lost 92 restaurants in 2025, up from 73 in 2024 and 48 in 2022. Mid-priced restaurants suffered some of the steepest losses.

Acqua Bistecca, chef Michael Mina’s ambitious Italian steakhouse at City Ridge, closed on August 10. It had opened less than a year earlier with the backing of a restaurant group that operates establishments across the country. If experience, capital, and a nationally recognized name could not guarantee one full year, imagine the odds facing a first-time entrepreneur investing their life savings in a neighborhood restaurant.

Acqua Bistecca’s closure does not prove that D.C. government caused it to fail. Mina cited declining travel and tourism, rising product and energy costs, and punishing conditions throughout the industry. Businesses also close because owners misjudge demand, choose the wrong location, take on too much space, or launch concepts that never find an audience.

But a jurisdiction where one out of every three new establishments closes within a year cannot dismiss each failure as an isolated business mistake. At some point, the pattern indicts the environment.

During my campaign for D.C. mayor, I met residents who decided to stick their necks out and build something in this city. They did not represent wealthy corporations or well-connected developers. They created dance studios, bars, restaurants, and neighborhood businesses. They invested their savings, accepted enormous personal risk, hired Washingtonians, and tried to contribute something valuable to their communities.

One bar owner in Dupont Circle told me that a D.C. government official had asked him for $10,000 to expedite a permit for a new establishment. Another entrepreneur who owned a dance studio told me that he left a District small-business office in tears because of how staff treated him.

Those conversations convinced me that the next administration must place economic revitalization at the top of its agenda. The city cannot measure success simply by ribbon cuttings, but by how many businesses remain open after one, three, and five years. Through my own work with federal government agencies, I know that customer service must underpin that work.

That phrase—customer service—may sound too simple for this crisis. It means giving entrepreneurs clear instructions, consistent answers, predictable timelines, coordinated reviews, and one accountable person to call when the process breaks down. It means treating their time and money as valuable.

Our campaign tried to put that principle into practice. We built a prototype Small Business Permitting Concierge that gave entrepreneurs one roadmap for navigating the city’s permits, licenses, inspections, and agencies. We later offered the concept to the Bowser administration but never reached a productive conversation about testing it. I will return to that experience because it offers both a model for better service and a warning about how D.C. government often responds to outside innovation.

The broader lesson extends beyond one digital tool: D.C. will not revive its economy through grants, incentives, and marketing campaigns while the daily machinery of government frustrates, confuses, and sometimes exploits the people trying to build businesses here. The next administration must do far more to bring life back into our neighborhoods and to our city.

When the system rewards fixers

A recent bribery case demonstrates what can happen when navigating government requires specialized connections.

Last month, a federal appeals court upheld the convictions of a self-described D.C. permit and licensing expediter and a local nightlife operator for their roles in a scheme that cost the District approximately $2.3 million.

Anthony Merritt, a former employee of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, marketed himself as someone who could help businesses navigate the District’s complicated regulatory system. Instead, prosecutors proved that he passed cash bribes from bar and nightclub owners to Vincent Slater, a supervisor in the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue. Slater manipulated government records to reduce their tax obligations. In one instance, he removed Echostage’s outstanding tax liabilities so the nightclub could renew its alcohol license. The D.C. Circuit affirmed the convictions in July.

The evidence showed that several business owners knowingly participated in the scheme. But the case still exposed a troubling ecosystem in which personal access, specialized knowledge, and government connections can carry more value than clear rules and predictable service.

When legitimate businesses believe they need a fixer simply to navigate city government, the system has failed. Corruption presents the most obvious problem. Bribery violates the law, betrays the public trust, and punishes everyone who follows the rules. But corruption thrives more easily inside systems marked by confusion, delay, discretion, and poor accountability.

That brings us back to D.C.’s broader failure: customer service.

Every unanswered email, contradictory instruction, unexplained delay, and disrespectful interaction carries a financial cost. For an entrepreneur operating with little margin for error, poor government service can consume months of savings or kill a promising business before it opens its doors. D.C. cannot make life more affordable for its residents while making it unaffordable—and unnecessarily difficult—to operate a business here.

A failure decades in the making

These stories reflect a problem that D.C. has allowed to fester for decades.

In 1993, business owners told the Washington Post that they could wait as long as six weeks for a final fire inspection or pay an additional fee to receive one within 48 hours. Restaurant owners blamed District agencies for delays lasting as long as four months. The resulting frustration helped sustain an industry of permit expediters who understood which office to call, which employee to approach, and how to move an application through the system. The article could almost have appeared this year.

The parallels extend beyond poor service. In 2016, former DCRA Business License Department employee Lucretia Barksdale pleaded guilty after accepting cash at her government workstation, allowing an undercover applicant to bypass the normal line, and issuing permits that falsely identified a licensed tradesman. A second employee, Stacie Williams, later admitted that she frequently worked with Barksdale in the scheme.

Twenty-three years separate these two stories, yet the basic choice remains familiar: endure the ordinary process or find someone with the money, knowledge, or connections to move faster. D.C. has repeatedly punished individual wrongdoers without fully redesigning the system that made their access so valuable.

That history makes Washington’s enduring businesses all the more remarkable. They survived because their owners built deep neighborhood roots, earned loyal customers, adapted through periods of upheaval, and carried institutions across generations. Their stories show what D.C. gains when businesses survive—and what the city now stands to lose.

What Washington loses when businesses disappear

Washington still benefits from businesses that survived long enough to become civic institutions. The Florida Avenue Grill opened with two stools in 1944 and remains one of the country’s oldest continuously operating Black-owned restaurants. Industrial Bank opened during the Great Depression with six employees and $192,000 in assets, then helped generations of Black Washingtonians buy homes and build businesses. The founding family still operates it more than 90 years later. A. Litteri reached its 100th anniversary in 2026, while Ben’s Chili Bowl has served Washington since 1958.

Those businesses became more than places to spend money. They created jobs, financed families, anchored commercial corridors, and gave their neighborhoods a sense of identity. Their longevity also makes D.C.’s current failure rate more alarming. In a city where nearly one-third of new establishments close within a year and 72 percent close within a decade, most entrepreneurs never receive enough time to develop deep roots or loyal customers. Each early closure can erase a future neighborhood institution before residents ever recognize what they lost.

Government cannot manufacture a beloved restaurant or a multigenerational bank. It can stop consuming the time and capital that businesses need to survive. The next administration should make the process understandable before an entrepreneur spends money, take responsibility for moving applications across agencies, and support viable businesses after they open.

A customer-service framework for small-business revival

Opening a restaurant reveals the problem further. Depending on the concept, an entrepreneur may need corporate registration and a business license from DLCP (Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection); tax registration and Clean Hands verification from OTR (Office of Tax and Revenue); construction permits, zoning approval, and a certificate of occupancy from DOB (Department of Buildings); a food-manager certificate, plan review, and inspection from DC Health; an alcohol license from ABCA (Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration); public-space approval from DDOT (District Department of Transportation); and fire-related permits or inspections from FEMS (Fire and Emergency Medical Services). Navigate this process, and one quickly discovers a daunting array of overlapping administrative agencies and acronyms.

Each requirement may protect a legitimate public interest. But the entrepreneur does not experience seven separate regulatory functions. The entrepreneur experiences one task: opening a restaurant. Government alone divided that task among agencies, websites, applications, and timelines.

D.C. does not lack ideas for improving that experience. Its own teams and economic plans have already described much of the necessary architecture. What the city lacks is sustained ownership, public deadlines, cross-agency follow-through, and consequences when promised reforms stall. The next mayor and DMPED should organize that unfinished work around three customer-service commitments: give entrepreneurs a complete roadmap before they apply, put one person in charge while agencies review their applications, and measure and support survival after they open.

Commitment One: One front door and no wrong door.

Good customer service starts before an entrepreneur signs a lease, hires an architect, or spends money on an application.

The District should give every business owner one accurate, address-specific roadmap that identifies the required permits, licenses, inspections, fees, documents, and sequence. The owner should create one reusable business profile, upload common information once, track every agency through one dashboard, and receive help online, by telephone, or in person. No applicant should need to understand the District’s organizational chart to follow the law.

Other governments already organize their services around that principle. Singapore’s GoBusiness platform brings more than 120 government services together and uses digital advisers to recommend the licenses and services an entrepreneur needs. Portugal’s “Company in an Hour” service lets an entrepreneur complete the procedures required to incorporate at one service desk. Neither country eliminated regulation. Both organized government around the task the customer wants to complete.

D.C. has already promised versions of that model. The city’s 2023–2027 Comeback Plan called for a physical and digital one-stop permitting center, a single login, shared data across agencies, personalized next steps, and a consolidated dashboard for forms and payments. DLCP’s Business Resource Center already describes itself as a concierge service, and its ward-based account managers give residents one contact for problems within DLCP.

The city has also made real technological progress. In 2023, DLCP and OCTO launched the DC Business Licensing Portal, which offered personalized checklists, cost and time estimates, and guidance for several common business types. This month, DLCP launched BOSS, its Business One Stop Solution. BOSS combines corporate registration with several licensing functions, reduces redundant uploads, sends deadline alerts, and gives users a dashboard with real-time status information. Those improvements deserve recognition.

But BOSS does not yet complete the journey described in the Comeback Plan. Its current scope centers on corporate registration and services administered by DLCP. An entrepreneur still cannot complete one transactional process across DOB, OTR, DC Health, ABCA, DDOT, and FEMS. The Resource Center and ward account managers can help with DLCP questions, but they cannot resolve every cross-agency dependency that determines whether a business opens.

The District had already designed a more ambitious approach. In 2022 and 2023, the mayor’s Innovation Team interviewed agencies, utilities, and small-business owners and developed seven permitting reforms. They included an address-specific Permit Explorer, joint concept reviews before submission, public and enforceable service standards, a universal permit wizard, streamlined Clean Hands checks, regulatory simplification, and help with permit costs. The team completed pilot-ready plans for its three leading proposals. Before those pilots launched, the mayor reassigned the team to another priority. Our next administration must do better.

Our campaign independently reached the same conclusion. One of our data leads, Alanna Fridfertig, built a prototype Small Business Permitting Concierge. An entrepreneur could describe the company, restaurant, bar, or other establishment they wanted to open and receive a step-by-step roadmap covering the permits, licenses, inspections, and government offices involved. The tool organized the process around the business owner’s goal rather than the government’s organizational chart.

After the campaign, we offered the prototype to the Bowser administration. We hoped the District might test it, compare it with the unfinished Innovation Team work, or incorporate parts of its approach into BOSS. We never reached a productive conversation about doing so.

Our prototype did not constitute a finished government product. A full implementation would require current agency data, legal review, accessibility testing, cybersecurity safeguards, extensive user testing, and clear ownership inside government. But the repetition itself makes the point: D.C. does not need another report explaining that entrepreneurs want one coherent journey. It needs to finish the work already designed.

The next administration should set public milestones for bringing the remaining agencies into BOSS and test the entire process with first-time entrepreneurs before calling it complete. The District already has legal language-access obligations; the new standard should require entrepreneurs to complete the same end-to-end transactions in the city’s threshold languages and require agencies to publish completion rates and disparities. Every business-facing webpage should identify the employee responsible for its accuracy and the date of its last substantive review. D.C. already employs teams that develop and test public-service ideas; it still needs a predictable route for an outside prototype to enter government. The city should publish evaluation criteria, name a decision-maker, respond within 90 days, and fund promising pilots with a defined path to adoption.

Commitment Two: One accountable owner and one reliable clock.

Clarity alone will not help an entrepreneur whose application disappears between agencies. Good customer service also requires someone to own the outcome, explain what comes next, and tell the truth about time.

The recent streatery transition shows what happens without that ownership. Martha Dear owner Tara Smith described the permanent-permit application as nearly a full-time job and waited almost seven months for approval. The process required coordination among DDOT, DOB, and ABCA and could also involve historic-preservation and arborist reviews. Meanwhile, other restaurant owners faced removal orders and possible fines while their applications remained under government review. Smith said the process demanded interagency coordination that did not exist within the government itself.

The sequencing of ordinary licenses can produce the same problem. The District requires many individuals and businesses seeking licenses, permits, grants, or contracts to obtain a Certificate of Clean Hands. The certificate confirms that the applicant has filed all required District tax returns and does not owe more than $1,000 in fees, fines, taxes, or penalties to OTR or the Department of Employment Services. Without that clearance, the District can deny the application.

For a restaurant owner, the Clean Hands check sits inside an already complicated chain of approvals. Before DLCP issues a restaurant license, the owner must produce a certificate of occupancy and an approved DC Health inspection report. OTR may take up to ten business days to process a new tax registration. When OTR provides a temporary override to complete the licensing check, that clearance may remain valid for only 48 hours. An owner can clear one requirement only to watch that clearance expire while another agency reviews the application.

Clean Hands failures often arrive as a surprise at the worst possible moment. The Lab @ DC reports that roughly one-quarter of Clean Hands requests get denied each year. The city has begun testing notices four months before license renewal that explain noncompliance and how to correct it. Diana Gross of the DC Chamber of Commerce captured the customer-service principle behind the pilot: “Businesses want to be in compliance and have a place to go and check … so that there is no gotcha.” If the pilot works, D.C. should make those notices permanent, integrate them into BOSS, and publish whether they reduce denials and forced interruptions.

D.C. has also proved that it can simplify rules. Before the Business and Entrepreneurship Support to Thrive Act, the District maintained more than 100 business-license and endorsement categories. Eleven categories had no licensed businesses, while 39 had issued fewer than 20 licenses over four years. Some fees exceeded $3,000. The BEST Act consolidated the system into 13 categories, lowered fees, removed outdated requirements, and capped penalties for expired licenses. The District deserves credit for that reform.

But the city should not wait for complexity to become indefensible before reviewing it. The DC Chamber of Commerce has called for a whole-of-government regulatory review every three years, supported by analysis of how proposed rules will affect small businesses. D.C. should adopt that recommendation and invite entrepreneurs, workers, consumers, and frontline employees to distinguish rules that protect the public from procedures that merely waste time.

The District has already proposed the other basic tool it needs: service-level agreements. Both the Innovation Team and the Comeback Plan called for agencies to publish permit-review timelines. The next administration should implement those promises, report monthly compliance, and attach consequences when government misses its own deadline.

DMPED should formalize the scattered pieces of business assistance into a Small Business Service Delivery Office with authority across agencies. The office should not replace the Business Resource Center, ward account managers, SmallBiz Assist, or agency reviewers. It should connect them. For every complex opening, one journey manager should give the entrepreneur a master timeline, identify dependencies, convene the relevant agencies, and remain responsible until the business receives a final answer.

That office needs written agreements with DLCP, DOB, OTR, DC Health, ABCA, DDOT, FEMS, and OCTO that define response times and escalation authority. A stalled application should escalate automatically. If a government-caused delay makes an approval expire or prevents an on-time renewal, the city should extend that approval or pause the related penalty clock. Applicants should not pay for time the government lost.

Every denial should explain the problem in plain language, identify the evidence or rule supporting it, and tell the owner exactly how to cure or appeal it. Every action should carry a timestamp visible to the applicant and supervisors. DMPED should not overrule legitimate health, safety, tax, zoning, or licensing decisions. It should make agencies coordinate their work and hold someone accountable for whether the entrepreneur receives a fair, timely answer.

Commitment Three: Measure and support business survival

Customer service cannot end when the city issues a license or cuts a ribbon. A government serious about revitalization should stay close enough to identify preventable problems during the vulnerable years that follow.

D.C. has already said that survival matters. The Comeback Plan named the five-year survival rate as a key economic indicator and promised an annual survey of business owners covering starts, ownership, capital, revenue, size, and survival. DMPED later conducted a 2024 Small Business Census, but the public census page still identifies only the 2024 effort and displays no annual survival series.

Current agency plans make that gap harder to excuse. DMPED’s fiscal year 2026 performance plan lists “Business Attraction and Retention” as a major activity, followed by “No Related Measures”. DSLBD’s plan likewise lists major objectives—including commercial-corridor revitalization and efficient, transparent, responsive government—without related performance measures. The city still cannot tell residents whether its small-business apparatus helps businesses survive.

The next deputy mayor should publish a business-survival dashboard built primarily from administrative records rather than another stand-alone survey. It should track the median time from first application to authorization to open; wait times at each agency; resubmissions caused by missing or contradictory instructions; application abandonment; use of accelerated service; and survival after one, three, and five years. The city should break those results down by industry, ward, owner demographics, and use of District assistance. The mayor should tie DMPED leadership evaluations and budget decisions to those outcomes.

Every agency can report that it processed its piece. Someone must answer for whether the business opened and survived.

That responsibility matters after opening because government decisions can suddenly change a business’s prospects. During construction around Dupont Circle this year, Rosemarino D’Italia reported that revenue fell 25 to 35 percent and employee hours fell 30 to 40 percent. Another owner summarized the conditions bluntly: “This is not a slowdown. This is a crisis.” Business owners said disrupted access, noise, dust, and poor communication drove customers away.

DDOT already requires written notice to affected businesses at least two weeks before certain scheduled construction and assigns a project manager to each project. The policy exists; the city should audit whether project teams follow it. Each major project should have a public schedule, a change log, coordinated signage, loading and pedestrian-access plans, and a contact who must answer within a published period.

DMPED also created a Capitol Hill Construction Impact Grant this year for businesses affected by specified DDOT projects. That response acknowledges the harm, but a one-time, place-specific competition does not create a reliable system. D.C. should establish a standing citywide formula that automatically offers bridge assistance when a public project crosses defined thresholds for duration, loss of access, or documented revenue decline. The owner should not have to discover a short application window after the damage begins.

The city should apply the same customer-service discipline to grants, loans, and technical assistance. The Comeback Plan promised a central technical-assistance hub and one base grant application. DSLBD now offers one-on-one guidance through SmallBiz Assist, while District Capitalized coordinates financing products, training, and referrals. Selected programs already provide upfront or milestone-based funding. Those pieces help, but businesses still confront separate portals, eligibility rules, financial forms, and application processes.

The next administration should set a deadline for one verified financial profile that, with the owner’s consent, a business can reuse across DMPED, DSLBD, participating lenders, Main Streets, and corridor programs. The system should match the owner with eligible support and show what additional information each program requires. Upfront or milestone payments should become the default whenever reimbursement would exclude businesses with the least cash, subject to appropriate controls.

The Small Business Service Delivery Office should also schedule check-ins 30, 90, 180, and 365 days after a business opens. Those contacts should focus on unresolved licensing issues, tax or renewal deadlines, construction losses, capital needs, and referrals—not another ceremonial survey. When a business cancels a license, withdraws its registration, or closes its tax account, the city should ask why. DMPED should publish the patterns in an annual small-business friction report and identify the policy owner responsible for each corrective action.

All of this work belongs within the affordability agenda the incoming administration is touting as essential to D.C.’s future. In fiscal year 2024, business franchise taxes generated approximately $1.13 billion for the District, while sales and use taxes generated another $2 billion. Businesses also support commercial-property revenue and create jobs whose wages produce income-tax revenue. Those interconnected sources finance schools, housing programs, health care, public safety, and the social safety net.

When businesses disappear, the city loses jobs, foot traffic, commercial-property value, and recurring tax revenue. An ambitious affordability agenda requires a strong and growing tax base, while business owners face the same rising rents, insurance premiums, utility bills, food costs, and borrowing costs as their customers. D.C. cannot make life more affordable for its residents by making it unaffordable to operate a business here.

The capitalist case for better government

The United States offers a broader lesson. Our economy produces serious wealth disparities, and government must confront them. Yet Americans also possess extraordinary earning power. In 2021, the OECD ranked the United States among the three countries with the highest median disposable household income, alongside Luxembourg and Norway.

No single policy explains that prosperity. The size of the American market, our universities, access to capital, natural resources, skilled workers, and technological innovation all contribute. But our economic system has also historically given individuals significant room to start companies, attract investment, experiment, hire people, and build wealth. The OECD has found that governments can strengthen business dynamism by reducing barriers to entry, encouraging experimentation, and helping new firms benefit from technology and innovation.

(Yes, I recognize the true capitalist in me speaking here.) But the underlying point should not divide people along ideological lines. Businesses create the jobs, wages, products, services, and tax revenue that make a broader affordability agenda possible. Government should regulate them where necessary, enforce those regulations consistently, and make compliance as straightforward as possible.

Make the lawful path the easiest path

Customer service must become the operating principle for D.C.’s small-business revival.

Before an entrepreneur applies, the government owes them an accurate roadmap. While agencies review the application, one official should own the timeline, resolve conflicts, and protect the applicant from penalties caused by government delay. After the business opens, DMPED should track whether it survives and intervene when government-created friction threatens an otherwise viable enterprise.

Running for mayor changed how I understand the politics surrounding that work. On the campaign trail, I met low-wage workers who could not afford the city they served. I also met entrepreneurs who had invested their savings, paid employees before paying themselves, and wondered whether one more delay or unexpected cost would force them to close. D.C. often treats those groups as opposing interests. They live in the same neighborhoods, support the same families, and depend on the same local economy.

The next mayor will face many tests. One of the hardest will involve reconciling our moral ambitions with the economic limits that determine whether businesses, jobs, and the tax base survive.

Democratic socialism, at its best, aims to make ordinary life freer, more affordable, and more survivable. That moral ambition deserves respect. A city where someone can work full time and still cannot afford rent, groceries, health care, or transportation has failed that worker.

But economics imposes a brutal constraint: good intentions cannot cover payroll. When a business cannot absorb another increase in wages, rent, insurance, utilities, food, taxes, or debt service, it cuts hours, raises prices, automates jobs, moves, or closes. The worker then loses the job, the neighborhood loses the business, and the District loses the revenue that supports its affordability agenda.

The continuing campaign to raise D.C.’s minimum wage to $25 an hour by 2029 captures that tension. The proposal will not appear on the November ballot, but its sponsors plan to pursue it in a future special election. During the mayoral campaign, Janeese Lewis George said that she did not consider a Districtwide increase to $25 wise under current economic conditions. That instinct reflects the pragmatism the next administration will need.

The warning signs extend beyond large restaurant groups. The Black-owned Urban Grape closed its D.C. location after only 19 months, although its owners did not identify a specific cause. During last year’s federal crackdown, the Salvadoran owner of Elizabeth Pupusería & Deli reported bringing in only $300 a day while normally paying workers roughly $500 a day. Those businesses faced different pressures. That is precisely the point. Small businesses absorb shocks from every direction, and government cannot evaluate any new mandate in isolation.

None of this excuses poverty wages. A city that preserves businesses while leaving workers unable to live here has not solved the problem. The goal of a more livable and affordable city remains essential. But reality and pragmatism must shape the route we take. If D.C. asks small businesses to shoulder higher costs, it should analyze the effect on the smallest employers, phase changes responsibly, reduce government-created expenses, and provide targeted relief that protects both wages and jobs.

The District has already studied many of its customer-service failures, designed promising solutions, and launched pieces of the required system. The next mayor does not need another report. The next mayor needs to finish the work, extend it across government, publish the results, and answer when the system fails.

Those commitments will also strengthen anti-corruption enforcement. Clear rules reduce discretion. Visible timelines expose unusual delays. A shared dashboard makes it harder for a fixer to claim that only money or political access can move an application. The easiest path should always involve following the law.

When government treats entrepreneurs’ time as valuable, businesses open sooner, generate revenue sooner, hire sooner, and gain a better chance of surviving. When DMPED owns the entire journey, entrepreneurs can spend less time managing the government and more time managing their businesses.

D.C. should never require an entrepreneur to hire a fixer simply to understand how the city works. The government should provide that guidance itself and remain beside the business long enough to help it last.

Only businesses that survive can keep paying workers, serving neighborhoods, and financing the more affordable city that Washingtonians deserve.

This post seeks to help readers understand “who’s who” in D.C. school governance, by unpacking the various actors that play a role in D.C. school governance and oversight, their roles, who currently holds the positions, and how they are appointed. It’s not intended as a commentary on how well the current structure works or and analysis of potential alternative structures, but rather a description of the current state.

I’ll write more about how D.C. came to have this unusual structure in an upcoming post, but for now it’s important to understand that D.C.’s current school governance structure was created by the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA) of 2007, which placed DCPS under the authority of the Mayor, created the offices of Deputy Mayor for Education and Office of the State Superintendent of Education, made the Public Charter School Board the District’s single authorizer responsible for overseeing all charter schools, and reconfigured the composition and role of the State Board of Education to its current form. Although subsequent legislation has made minor changes to this structure, it remains largely intact today.

District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor:

DCPS’ Chief Executive is the Chancellor, essentially the equivalent to a Superintendent in other large urban districts. The DCPS Chancellor oversees the operations of the 117 schools that DCPS operates, and is appointed directly by the Mayor. Currently, DCPS has an interim chancellor, Dr. Kim Jackson, who was appointed by Mayor Bowser to fill the position on a temporary basis following long-time Chancellor Lewis Ferebee’s departure in June to assume leadership of EdReports, a national organization that reviews school curriculum.

Public Charter School Board (PCSB):

PCSB is the District’s charter school authorizer, the entity given authority by law to grant charters to operate public schools. Crucially, the PCSB does not directly operate charter schools, each of which has its own chief executive and board. However, PCSB is responsible for monitoring whether schools it has authorized comply with local and federal laws and the terms of their charters, as well as whether schools are stewarding public funds appropriately, and holding schools accountable for performance, compliance, and fiscal stewardship. PCSB also has authority (and in some cases is required) to close charter schools when they fail to meet their charter goals, are chronically low-performing, or are no longer financially viable. The Board itself, on which I served from 2009-2017, is a decision-making body that comprises seven volunteer members who are appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the D.C. Council. The Board employs an Executive Director to lead day-to-day authorizing work, represent PCSB’s and charter schools’ interests in engagement with other D.C. government agencies and the public, and manage the PCSB staff, budget, and operations. The current PCSB Executive Director is Michelle Walker Davis. PCSB was established in 1997, following passage of D.C.’s charter school law.

Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE):

OSSE is the District’s equivalent of a State Department of Education in most states. It has the same roles and functions as other state education agencies (SEAs), including (but not limited to) administering the District’s student assessment system for students enrolled in all public schools, operating the District’s longitudinal student data system and managing data on public school enrollment and attendance, administering federal education grant programs that flow through states to local education agencies (LEAs, which includes both DPCS and charter LEAs), holding LEAs accountable for compliance with federal special education laws and reporting to the federal government on special education indicators, and licensing teachers to teach in public schools. Because of DC’s unique state-local structure and choice-based education system that includes both public and charter schools, OSSE also fills a number of functions that are not always found in SEAs, including (but not limited to) overseeing early childhood programs (a function I led within OSSE from 2020-this April, and which is also housed in the education agencies in our neighboring states of Virginia and Maryland), administering early intervention for infants and toddlers with disabilities and developmental delays, operating the Advanced Technical Center and GED testing programs, licensing higher education institutions, and operating school transportation (buses) for children with disabilities. OSSE is a relatively young agency, created in 2008 following passage of PERAA. The leader of OSSE is the State Superintendent of Education, a role currently held by Dr. Antoinette Mitchell.

State Board of Education (SBOE):

The SBOE is an elected body, comprising 9 elected members, one for each Ward, plus a president elected at large, as well as three appointed student representatives. Under PERAA, SBOE is largely an advisory and approval body. In this capacity, it is responsible for reviewing and approving a variety of D.C. education-related standards and policies, including: state academic standards, the annual school report card, high school graduation requirements and equivalence credentials, standards for teacher preparation programs, state policies for parental involvement, rules for residency verification and enforcing student attendance, the lists of accreditation organizations for charter schools and private placements, and standards for homeschooling. In addition, the SBOE is responsible for reviewing and approving some plans and policies required in connection with federal education laws and programs, such as the District’s state school accountability plan and waivers under the Every Student Succeeds Act. All of the previously referenced standards and policies are developed and administered by OSSE but require approval from SBOE. SBOE is also charged with advising the State Superintendent on education issues but does not have operational authority over OSSE, or over any state-level education functions beyond those explicitly delegated to it in statute, nor does it have any operational authority over DCPS. Over the past twenty years, there have been multiple efforts to expand the SBOE’s authority over education in D.C., most notably passage of legislation in 2014 and 2017 that gave it authority over the Office of the Ombudsman for Public Education and the Office of the Student Advocate as well as the ability to hire staff for those positions and its own administrative staff. Its actual powers, however, remain limited. SBOE has existed largely in its current form since 2009, following the passage of PERAA and election of new SBOE board members in 2008, but some form of elected board has existed in D.C. since 1968.

Deputy Mayor for Education (DME):

The DME, within the Mayor’s office, is responsible for developing and overseeing a District-wide education strategy on behalf of the Mayor and facilitating coordination and collaboration across the various entities that make up the District’s birth-postsecondary public education system (e.g. DCPS, charter schools, OSSE, and the University of the District of Columbia (UDC)) as well as between education and other District government agencies (e.g. MPD, D.C. Department of Health) on matters that affect education and/or children, such as school safety. As part of this work it develops the Public Education Master Facilities Plan as well as a variety of other data analyses and reports that inform education planning in the District. DME also directly oversees or supports education-related agencies under the authority of the Mayor, including DCPS, OSSE, Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Employment Services, and the Workforce Investment Council, as well as coordination with independent agencies of D.C. government responsible for education (e.g. D.C. Public Libraries, PCSB, UDC). Over time, the DME has also taken on responsibility for operating some initiatives and programs designed to fill gaps in D.C.’s education system, including administering grants for and sharing information with families about out of school time programs. Because DME is located within the Mayor’s office and is more a strategic, policy, and coordinating entity than an operational agency, its priorities and how it carries out its work vary based on the goals and culture of each Mayor’s administration. The current DME is Paul Kihn. The upcoming Mayor transition will mean a transition in the office of DME as well, and who the incoming Mayor picks for this key role is an important signal of her likely priorities and approach.

The Mayor:

It’s probably obvious by now that the Mayor plays a major role in education governance in D.C.: She appoints the DCPS Chancellor, the DME, the State Superintendent, and the members of the public charter school board (though not its executive director), and DCPS, DME, and OSSE are under her direct control. Her administration also sets proposed funding levels for education agencies and programs (including proposed UPSFF increases) as part of the annual budget process. This means that the end of current Mayor Muriel Bowser’s term and transition to a new Mayor in January 2027 will have significant implications for the District’s public education system.

The D.C. Council:

As the legislature for the District., the D.C. Council also plays a major role in D.C. education policy and governance. Major Mayoral appointments require Council confirmation, as does the DCPS teachers union contract. The Council sets ultimate funding levels for education agencies and programs within them. In the absence of an elected board of education with operational authority over D.C. schools, the Council has at times chosen to step into that role. It passed the Schools First Budgeting Act, for example, which seeks to prescribe how DCPS sets school-level budgets. The Council has also used its authority under PERAA to impose new statutory requirements on both charter and DCPS schools, including requirements related to literacy instruction, physical education, and school discipline. And Councilmembers use their oversight authority to grill the DCPS Chancellor and OSSE Superintendent on operational specifics in annual budget and performance oversight hearings. Further, PERAA, the law that has defined D.C. education governance for the past two decades, was enacted by the Council, and the Council has the authority to change it. A key takeaway for DC parents and voters to understand is that, while PERAA gives the Mayor operational control of DCPS and both DCPS and OSSE leadership ultimately report to the Mayor, any effort to enact major changes in DCPS or the District's broader school governance structure requires Council engagement and support.

In some ways, when it comes to federal funding, D.C. is not fundamentally different from other state and local governments, if we think of those as consolidated entities. As with them, most of our federal funding is earmarked for healthcare spending, with income security, transportation, and education as other major functional categories.

In other respects, D.C.’s unique characteristics come to the forefront. Its Medicaid grant, the bulk of the healthcare category, is based on a matching rate set by statute rather than derived from the usual per-capita income formula. Much of the District’s transit funding flows to a regional joint venture. And its courts and prison are run directly by the federal government. These wrinkles make it particularly important to clarify what we mean by federal funding for the District.

One natural distinction is between funds that flow through D.C.’s books and funds that do not. Funds that flow through D.C.’s books are mostly federal grants in the ordinary sense: grants that exist because a federal statute created them and an agency appropriation funds them. These grants involve money distributed by federal agencies for programs the District administers just like any state or local government might. They amounted to $5.2 billion in FY2025. Medicaid (the largest grant by far, about 60 percent of the total), TANF, and Title I funding for K-12 schools are among the best-known grant programs.

There are two other types of federal funds that flow through D.C.’s books. DC-specific federal payments, appropriated in the D.C. Appropriations Act, include reimbursements for security costs associated with the federal presence and totaled $160 million. And the federal government pays pension benefits to retired District employees that are attributable to service before the 1997 Revitalization Act, just over $680 million.

Note: District of Columbia Annual Comprehensive Financial Report 2025, Exhibit 2-b, p. 59, and Note 13A, “Transactions with the Federal Government,” p. 156. Federal payments are the residual of total federal contributions less the on-behalf pension payment.

The total amount of federal funds that flowed through D.C.’s books in FY2025 was about $6 billion. Combined with own-source revenue of some $13.3 billion, this adds up to $19.3 billion, of which federal funds were 31.3 percent. If we exclude the aforementioned pension benefit payments—over which the District exercises no discretion whatsoever and which are booked as both revenue and expenditure by accounting convention—the share is 28.8 percent. The total federal share was 31.0 percent in FY2016, very similar to now, but it spiked during the pandemic, peaking at 37.1 percent in FY2022.

Note: District of Columbia Annual Comprehensive Financial Report 2025, Exhibit S-1D, “Changes in Fund Balances - Governmental Funds - Last Ten Fiscal Years,” p. 218.

Other federal funds do not flow through D.C.’s books, even if they pay for our non-federal (quasi-)public sector. These include funds for the functions Congress removed from home rule in the 1997 Revitalization Act: the courts, probation and parole, indigent defense, felony incarceration, and local prosecution by the U.S. Attorney.

The federal funds numbers above also do not include funds for independent authorities and interstate compacts, such as the D.C. Housing Authority, D.C. Water, and WMATA. Neither do they include certain monies for private entities like charter schools. (Most charter school funding does flow through, because the Office of the State Superintendent of Education is a District agency that subgrants to charters and DCPS alike.) Finally, they do not include the cost of the Department of Defense’s deployment of National Guard troops to DC, estimated to exceed $600 million for FY2027.

Comparing federal funding for the District to the funds received by other states (and their localities) involves several complications. But in my next post, that is precisely what I will do.

How did D.C. come to be such an outlier in providing free public preK? How does D.C. deliver and fund public preK? And what are the implications and results for children and families? This post explores these questions.

How D.C. became a preK outlier

The history of public preK in D.C. dates back to the 1960s, when D.C. was an early pilot site for the federal Head Start program, and DCPS schools included locally funded preK classrooms. By the 2001-02 school year, preK was available in all DCPS elementary schools and reached nearly 4,300 children (44% of 4-year-olds at the time). At that point, D.C.’s charter sector was only five years old and still nascent, so its role delivering preK was small—but that would change quickly.

The passage of D.C.’s charter school law in 1996 necessitated the creation of a school funding formula (called the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, or UPSFF) to distribute public funds between DCPS and charter schools. Because DCPS already enrolled a significant number of preK students, preK was included in the UPSFF. As a result, charter leaders recognized that they could also enroll preK students and receive UPSFF funds. In 2004, Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School (whose board I served on from 2006-2009 and recently rejoined as a parent member) received a charter to operate a school specifically focused on preK students, and most charter elementary schools would eventually include preK in their grade offerings, growing the supply of public preK in charter schools. At the same time, DCPS, facing decreasing enrollment due to competition from charter schools, expanded preK offerings as part of a strategy to attract parents, which it was able to do in part because enrollment declines had created excess space in many schools.

The growth of preK in DCPS and charter schools posed a challenge for D.C. child care operators. Child care providers in the U.S. typically rely on surpluses generated from preschool-aged care to offset the higher operating costs (and often operating losses) they incur to serve infants and toddlers.

As preschoolers left child care for free preK in public and charter schools, however, this model was no longer sustainable.3 Concerned about the impacts on both child care businesses and supply of care for infants and toddlers, D.C. early childhood advocates pushed for a way for child care programs to also offer publicly funded preK, which they achieved in 2008 with the passage of the PreK Enhancement and Expansion Act. That legislation created a program, now known as the PreK Enhancement and Expansion Program (PKEEP), through which child care programs can apply to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) to be recognized as meeting preK requirements and, if approved, receive public funding to serve preK students.

The intent of PKEEP is that participating child care programs deliver preK that is equal in quality to and funded at the same levels as prek provided by DCPS and charter schools, though there have been complications in how this works in practice. DCPS and charter schools receive per-student funding through the UPSFF, just as they do for students in grades K-12.

PKEEP programs, however, receive funds in the form of a grant from OSSE, which complements funds they receive from the child care subsidy program to match the UPSFF per-child funding level. Funding for the grant program does not increase automatically when the UPSFF increases, however. As both PKEEP enrollment and the UPSFF rose in the 2010s, this created a structural deficit in the PKEEP program, which has required OSSE to cap the program’s enrollment. And recent budget cycles have included proposals to cut the program’s funding and enrollment, in response to other D.C. budget pressures.

D.C.’s current preK landscape

As a result of this history, D.C. now offers publicly funded preK through a “mixed delivery” system that includes DCPS, charter schools, and community based child care facilities. Currently, charter schools account for the plurality of preK enrollment, followed by DCPS, with community-based child care programs constituting a much lower share.

OSSE, 2025-26 school year enrollment audit report data

*Reflects data from school year 2024-25, OSSE Fiscal Year 2024 PreK Report

Following the passages of the 2008 legislation, the supply of preK slots and number of children served across all three sectors grew, peaking at 13,791 students in school year 2019-20, fell precipitously during the pandemic, and remains below pre-COVID levels. Trends in preK enrollment track demographic trends—the number of annual births in D.C. has been falling since 2016—but also reflect fluctuation in the percentage of 3-year-olds enrolled in preK.

DC Publicly Funded PreK Enrollment by Sector and Year (2011-2026)

Sources: OSSE Fiscal Year 2024 PreK Report, OSSE 2024-2025 school year enrollment data report, OSSE 2025-26 school year enrollment audit report data

Navigating preK choice in D.C.

PreK students, unlike those in grades K-12, do not have a guaranteed slot at their neighborhood DCPS school of right, meaning that families wishing to enroll a child in preK at a DCPS or charter school must apply through the MySchoolDC lottery process, and children can be waitlisted for preK at their zoned DCPS school.

Districtwide, D.C. had capacity to serve 14,513 preK students across all three sectors in school year 2023-24, or enough seats to serve over 97 percent of the 14,910 children ages 3 and 4 who lived in D.C. that year. Because preK enrollment is voluntary (mandatory school attendance in D.C. starts at age 5), less than 97 percent of age-eligible children attend preK. This means that, city-wide, the District has more preK seats than it needs to serve all children whose families wish to enroll; in school year 2023-24 only 91% of public preK seats were utilized across all three sectors. But citywide trends don’t provide a full picture. Some popular DCPS and charter schools have long waiting lists for preK, while others are underenrolled, as are some PKEEP programs. Families who are committed to finding a slot in a free preK program in DC can definitely do so, but, depending on where they live, it may not be in their neighborhood.

Unlike DCPS and charter schools, child care centers participating in PKEEP do not enroll children through the MySchoolDC lottery, but each enrolls students through its own process, subject to oversight by OSSE. This is intentional, because one of the purposes of the PKEEP program is to support continuity for children and financial viability of child care businesses by enabling children who attended a child care center as infants and toddlers to remain in the same program through preK.

If you have a child eligible to start preK this school year (meaning they will be at least 3 years old but not yet 5 on Sept. 30, 2026), but did not participate in MySchoolDC and/or are not currently enrolled in a preK program, you can still enroll your child in public preK in D.C. through the post-lottery application process. District-wide, 103 schools, located across all six wards, currently have waitlists of less than 10 students for slots in preK-3, as do 105 for preK-4. Families can also contact child care centers that operate PKEEP programs directly to inquire about available slots in these programs.

Learning from D.C.’s universal preK experience

Stepping back, D.C.’s evolution as a national leader in preK access offers lessons both for D.C. policy and governance beyond early childhood and for early childhood efforts and efforts in other states. D.C. achieved the nation’s most expansive free public preK program through a combination of policy, supply, and demand factors, as well as chance. That pathway has had both pros and cons, all of which merit further reflection.

In terms of policy choices, the decision to implement preK in DCPS starting in the 1960s, the enactment and design of D.C.’s charter law, the decision to include preK in the UPSFF, and the passage of the 2008 Pre-K Act all played a role. One key lesson is that including preK in the state school funding formula, as D.C. does for DCPS and charter schools, builds political support and offers a much more scalable and sustainable approach to funding universal access than funding preK through a separate grant line that can only be increased through the annual budget process (as evidenced by the history of PKEEP funding battles in recent budget cycles).

Other states and cities that have enacted policies to provide universal preK have struggled to build the supply of preK slots needed to realize that promise. In D.C., a number of factors contributed to build a supply of preK slots adequate to serve virtually all eligible children, including: the inclusion of preK slots in newly created charter schools as the sector grew, the competitive response from DCPS, and the opportunity for child care facilities to offer publicly funded preK, which they wanted to do in order to maintain viable businesses. One key lesson here is that, in a choice-based system like D.C. public education (or the U.S. child care market) competition for student enrollment (and the money that accompanies it) is a powerful driver of school and child care program behavior.

But D.C.’s high rate of public preK enrollment also reflects family demand. Other jurisdictions with expansive preK policies and robust supply, such as Vermont, New York City, and some of New Jersey’s Abbot districts, have lower rates of preK enrollment because their take-up rates are lower than D.C.’s. This is partly a reflection of demographics. D.C. has a relatively high share of both two-income professional families and working single parents, two groups particularly interested in free preK. D.C.’s high cost of child care also contributes to high take-up rates, as does our choice-based K-12 school system. Families that want to enroll their children in popular charter or DCPS district-wide options know they have the best shot at winning a lottery slot in the school’s entry grade—which for most elementary schools is preK.

Moreover, the established history of public preK in D.C. and high participation rates have their own momentum: Many D.C. families just assume their child will start school at age 3. Advocates in other states often assume that parents will prefer preK in community-based child care to preK in schools, because of the longer hours offered or convenience of shared pick-ups with younger children. D.C.’s experience suggests that’s not always the case, as enrollment data suggests parents often opt for school-based programs with a clear feeder pattern through desirable elementary and middle schools over child care programs. This is helped by the fact that D.C.’s robust school choice market and competition for students pushes schools to ensure that before- and after-care arrangements (subsidized for low-income students and parent paid for other families) are available in most elementary schools.

There’s also an element of chance and contingency here. D.C. did not become a national preK leader because a single leader or group of leaders sat down, drafted a plan, and meticulously implement it over multiple years to reach universal preK. Instead, a variety of actors (DCPS leadership, charter school founders, early childhood advocates, the D.C. Council) took different actions at specific points in time, in response to their own incentives, priorities, and opportunities they saw, and those actions resulted in and shaped universal preK in D.C.

In D.C.’s fragmented and confusing education governance system (more on that in an upcoming post!), it’s natural for parents and community members to want “someone in charge” who can fix problems that cut across sectors and force disparate actors to work together. It’s hard to believe that markets and organizations making independent decisions in alignment with their own incentives and mission can drive positive results. But that is, by and large, what has happened with universal preK access in D.C.

To be sure, there are downsides to a decentralized education system premised heavily on parent choice and school autonomy—as I’ve seen well across my charter sector, state regulatory, and parent roles. When it comes to preK, for example, this approach has resulted in robust public preK supply, but a smaller role for community-based child care in D.C. preK delivery than many child care operators or advocates would like. And that has in turn negatively impacted child care supply and increased costs of care for infants and toddlers.

But decentralized leadership and systems in which no one actor is truly “in charge” can also have benefits, because independent actors responding to opportunities and demand in a competitive marketplace can arrive at solutions that wouldn’t have occurred to a centralized planner. That’s worth keeping in mind as D.C. leaders consider the future of D.C. education governance, as well as how to drive economic growth and solve complex and thorny problems across a range of sectors and policy areas in the coming years.

One final note: I realize that in over 2,000 words I haven’t said anything about the results of D.C. universal preK beyond student access. In the current U.S. early childhood landscape, D.C.’s level of universal preK access is itself an accomplishment, and one that matters to many families. There’s definitely more to say about the results, though, and what we know (and in some cases don’t know) about preK program quality, impacts on children’s learning and school attendance, and impacts on DC school enrollment, maternal workforce participation, and economic growth. If you’re interested in more on these topics, let us know and I’ll address them in a follow-up.

D.C. stands on the edge of its first mayoral transition in 12 years. The presumptive mayor, Janeese Lewis George, will inherit an opportunity to change how District government operates and an obligation to restore public trust.

My own experience running for office, and the vast amount of information I uncovered along the way, has convinced me the next mayor’s first major ethics test will be the people she appoints to run the government and the actions she takes to rid D.C. of its existing corruption culture.

Agency directors and senior political appointees make decisions that shape nearly every part of life in the District. They oversee contracts, grants, licensing, development, housing, public safety, education, and billions of dollars in public resources. Their judgment determines whether residents receive competent service and whether taxpayers can trust the government acting in their name.

That is why this transition must do more than replace one group of insiders with another. Lewis George must choose capable, ethical leaders and build systems that expose conflicts, track performance, protect public money, and impose consequences regardless of status or connections. Washingtonians should not have to trust that this administration will govern differently. They should be able to see that it does.

Corruption is a Systems Problem

Corruption has accompanied the government for as long as people have held public power. American politics provides plenty of examples, from Teapot Dome and Watergate to bribery schemes involving state legislators, regulators, and government contractors. D.C. has lived with its own versions for decades. The scandals have changed names and agencies, but the patterns remain familiar: political relationships crossing into government business, contracts influenced by personal interests, officials using public positions for private gain, and oversight arriving only after journalists or prosecutors expose the damage. The history stretches from contracting scandals during the Barry era to the ethics violations that drove former Councilmember Jack Evans from office and recent bribery cases inside District agencies.

Not every ethics violation carries the same moral weight. But they share a common mechanism: someone separates public authority from public accountability. A favor in a contracting office can produce a defective building, an ineffective public-safety program, an unqualified service provider, or a government agency that fails when residents need it most. This matters.

What Denmark and Singapore Can Teach our City

Denmark and Singapore offer two distinct approaches to limiting public corruption. Denmark scored 89 on the 2025 CPI, ranking first among 182 countries and territories. Singapore scored 84, ranking third. Their records demonstrate that no single anti-corruption model guarantees success, but effective systems consistently make misconduct easier to detect and harder to escape.

Transparently, ha!, I should disclose a bias: I spent three years of my life in Singapore. Granted, they were my toddler years, but I retain a particular affinity for the country and the way it conducts public business (minus its draconian tendencies).

Singapore often approaches the government like a corporation. It recruits highly credentialed officials, pays them competitively, measures their performance, and imposes serious consequences when they violate the public trust. The compensation benchmark for an entry-level minister totals approximately S$1.1 million annually, while the prime minister’s package totals approximately S$2.2 million. Portions of that compensation depend on individual performance and national economic outcomes. The theory remains straightforward: pay enough to attract capable leaders, then demand unusually high standards of conduct from them.

High salaries alone cannot explain Singapore’s record. Its Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau built a reputation for pursuing corruption regardless of an offender’s rank or political affiliation. Singaporean law allows substantial fines, imprisonment, and the forfeiture of illicit gains. In 2024, former Transport Minister S. Iswaran pleaded guilty to obtaining valuable gifts while serving as a public official and obstructing justice. A court sentenced him to 12 months in prison.

D.C. should not copy Singapore wholesale. Its political system concentrates power and limits forms of political expression, assembly, and opposition that Washingtonians rightly consider fundamental. Freedom House classifies Singapore as “Partly Free.” Rigorous enforcement cannot justify sacrificing democratic rights or due process.

Denmark provides a useful democratic counterpoint. Its approach places greater emphasis on openness, access to government records, independent review, and administrative institutions that make official decisions visible to the public. Denmark’s Access to Public Administration Files Act establishes public access to government records, while the independent Parliamentary Ombudsman helps enforce those obligations and investigate administrative failures. Denmark’s own Ombudsman has called access to public files a cornerstone of an open society.

Neither country offers a perfect template, and the CPI measures perceptions rather than every act of misconduct. But, Denmark and Singapore illustrate the balance DC needs. Singapore demonstrates the importance of clear rules, credible investigations, and consequences that reach powerful people. Denmark demonstrates the value of transparency, independent scrutiny, and institutions that allow the public to see how authority gets exercised.

Weak Accountability Costs the Taxpayer

The costs already surround us.

In fiscal year 2023, D.C. led the country in public-school spending at $31,629 per student, measured in raw dollars. Yet despite recent gains, student outcomes remain nowhere near what that level of investment should produce. In 2025, only 34.8 percent of students in grades three through five met or exceeded expectations in English language arts. Only 31.2 percent met that standard in math. Among high school students, just 15 percent met or exceeded math expectations.

During this same period, a federal jury convicted former D.C. Public Schools contract specialist Dana Garnett for participating in a bribery and wire-fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors proved that she steered DCPS business to favored vendors, accepted kickbacks for years, and allowed vendors to deliver significantly fewer supplies than the school system had purchased. A judge later sentenced her to 24 months in prison.

That conviction does not explain the District’s overall education outcomes. It does illustrate how weak controls can drain a system that already spends heavily. Money approved for students loses its value when an employee can redirect contracts, accept incomplete deliveries, and collect payments from vendors without intervention.

The 2026 snowstorm provides another example. D.C. spent more than $67 million on cleanup. Approximately $4.5 million went to District Logistics, a trucking company whose owner had faced a federal indictment since November 2025 for allegedly defrauding the federal government of approximately $1.35 million in pandemic-relief funds. District procurement officials reportedly did not learn about the indictment until April, months after the storm.

The episode raises an obvious question: How did the District direct millions of emergency dollars to a company without detecting that its owner already faced federal fraud charges?

Both cases expose the same structural weakness. The government checks whether someone signed a form, but not always whether the vendor delivered, the official disclosed a relationship, the agency resolved a warning, or the public received value.

An Anti-Corruption Model for D.C.

Any reform agenda begins with the people entrusted to carry it out. Agency leaders translate a mayor’s promises into staffing decisions, contracts, regulations, and public services.

During the campaign, Janeese Lewis George emphasized the importance of hiring capable people who can deliver results. Her administration now has an opportunity to prove that coalition representation and administrative competence do not have to compete.

The next administration should organize its anti-corruption work around four commitments: making auditors matter, fixing procurement, creating predictable consequences, and making transparency the default. These reforms can prevent misconduct, catch it earlier, and produce a meaningful response before the public absorbs the cost.

1. Act on Warnings: Make Auditors Matter

Effective governments need a disciplined way to identify failure before it hardens into routine practice. Auditors examine evidence across agencies and administrations, compare performance against laws and professional standards, identify the causes behind recurring problems, and recommend corrective action. They provide something political transitions often lack: an institutional memory of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government can prevent it from happening again.

D.C. does not need another oversight office or audit-tracking program. It already has talented auditors and much of the necessary infrastructure. The Office of the Inspector General, the Office of the D.C. Auditor, agency inspectors general, and Council staff regularly uncover waste, control failures, legal violations, and programs that cannot demonstrate results. The Office of Risk Management already maintains ERisk, a District-wide portal through which agencies manage, track, and respond to findings from the Inspector General, DC Auditor, and external auditors. The OIG and D.C. Auditor also publish reports tracking the status of their recommendations.

The District’s problem stems from what happens after auditors identify a problem. The current system scatters public information across reports, spreadsheets, agency responses, and Council records. Residents cannot easily follow a finding from publication through correction, identify the senior official responsible for fixing it, or determine why an agency missed a deadline. The government tracks recommendations internally, but the public lacks one clear view of whether leaders acted.

In 2021, the D.C. Auditor found that the Office of Unified Communications failed to meet national standards for timely assistance on top-priority fire and emergency medical calls during most of the 24 months reviewed. Auditors cited inadequate supervision and weak quality assurance and recommended increasing the number of shift supervisors from 11 to 38. Significant staffing increases did not begin until 2023. For a resident waiting for an ambulance, delayed implementation does not represent an administrative abstraction. It can determine whether help arrives in time. As I routinely described during the campaign trail, a member of my community, William Ostertag, died of cardiac arrest because DC 911 coded his call incorrectly. Our corruption culture is deadly.

The broader numbers reveal the scale of the follow-through problem. As of September 30, 2025, the Inspector General had reviewed 483 recommendations across 66 reports involving 41 agencies. Of those, 366 remained open, including 133 for which agencies had not agreed upon an adequate corrective action. Of the 117 recommendations closed during the year, 34 closed without resolution. In some cases, circumstances had overtaken the recommendation. In others, an agency declined to implement stronger controls and accepted the accompanying risk.

The Lewis George administration should build on what D.C. already has. Rather than launch another program, it should create a public-facing interface for the District’s existing audit-management system. That interface should consolidate recommendations from the Inspector General, D.C. Auditor, and other oversight bodies. For each recommendation, residents should see the finding, the responsible agency, the senior official who owns the corrective action, the promised deadline, the evidence required to demonstrate completion, the current status, and the reason for any delay.

Agencies already respond to draft D.C. Auditor reports within 15 business days by stating whether they agree or disagree with each recommendation. The next administration should take the next step: within 90 days after a final report, the responsible agency should publish a corrective-action plan or explain why it will pursue another course. Agencies should then update their progress quarterly through the public interface.

D.C. also already has a forum for executive follow-through. The Office of the City Administrator conducts CapSTAT sessions and quarterly cluster meetings to review agency performance, budgets, and operational challenges. Unresolved audit findings should become a standing agenda item in those meetings, not the subject of a new board or bureaucracy. The mayor and city administrator should require agency directors to explain overdue corrective actions and incorporate those results into existing performance plans and evaluations.

Of course, elected officials should not treat every auditor recommendation as an unquestionable command. Agencies may identify legal, financial, or operational reasons to choose another solution. But disagreement cannot excuse silence. When an administration rejects a recommendation, it should explain its reasoning publicly, identify an alternative corrective action, and disclose the risk it has chosen to accept.

D.C. already pays people to find its weaknesses, maintains a system to track them, and convenes leaders to review agency performance. The next mayor does not need to build something new. She needs to make the government use what it already has and let residents see whether it works.

2. Fix Procurement from Award Through Delivery

D.C. can budget money for school supplies, behavioral-health programs, road repairs, affordable housing, or emergency response, but residents receive value only when a qualified vendor performs the work. A contract award authorizes spending. It does not guarantee results.

D.C. does not lack procurement rules, personnel, or technology. District law already requires competition, documentation, Council review of certain large contracts, and public disclosure. The Office of Contracting and Procurement already operates an electronic procurement system, a public contracting portal, an integrity and compliance office, and the Contractor Performance Evaluation System, or CPES. District law also requires agencies to consider past performance when evaluating proposals and protects new vendors from receiving a negative rating simply because they lack a government contracting history.

The problem begins when agencies fail to use those controls and the systems allow contracting actions to proceed anyway. In 2025, the Inspector General reviewed 40 contracts that required performance evaluations and found no evidence of an evaluation for 12. Auditors also examined 81 invoices and found that 37, covering approximately $17.1 million in payments, lacked documentation showing that District personnel had inspected what the government purchased. Those failures exposed the District to poor performance, inflated invoices, and payments for incomplete or defective work.

D.C. created CPES to prevent that outcome. The system allows agencies to evaluate contractors on contracts worth at least $100,000, gives vendors an opportunity to respond, and preserves performance information for future awards and option decisions. Yet agencies do not consistently complete the evaluations, different procurement authorities use different systems, and contract administrators reported that CPES did not always send the expected evaluation notices.

The next administration should make those existing controls unavoidable. CPES and the District’s procurement system should block an option, renewal, extension, final closeout, or additional award to an existing contractor until the responsible agency completes the required evaluation. Agencies should evaluate covered contractors before each option or renewal, at final completion, and at least annually during longer multiyear contracts. OCP should also collect evaluations from DGS and other procurement authorities in one searchable government repository. When the District selects a contractor with a documented record of poor performance, officials should publicly explain why that vendor still offers the best value.

D.C. also needs stronger safeguards against an official steering the initial award. District law already requires requests for proposals to publish their evaluation criteria and relative weights. OCP already uses technical evaluation panels for some major procurements, with members scoring proposals individually before producing a consensus report for the contracting officer. District law also restricts communications intended to influence a source selection outside the authorized process.

The next mayor should standardize those protections for substantial, complex, and high-risk contracts. Panelists should record and electronically lock their individual scores before discussing the proposals as a group, creating a record of any later change. Everyone who writes the requirements, evaluates a bid, recommends an award, or approves the selection should complete a procurement-specific disclosure identifying personal, professional, and financial relationships with the bidders and their beneficial owners. The government can cross-check those disclosures against beneficial-ownership information that District businesses already file. Officials with conflicts should recuse themselves, and the contract file should document that decision.

Post-award controls need the same treatment. District rules already require personnel to receive, inspect, and accept goods and services before the government pays an invoice. Contracts worth more than $100,000 already receive a designated contract administrator responsible for monitoring performance, reviewing invoices, and recommending option exercises. The Inspector General’s findings demonstrate that policy alone does not ensure compliance. The procurement system should require inspection documentation and approval from the appropriate District employee before releasing payment. No individual should control the specifications, vendor evaluation, award, inspection, and payment.

The District should also use its existing data to identify contracts that deserve additional scrutiny. OCP’s Office of Procurement Integrity and Compliance already conducts audits, reviews procurement operations, and investigates fraud, waste, abuse, conflicts, and bribery. The administration should equip that office with automated alerts for repeated emergency awards, single-bid competitions, concentrated spending with one vendor, sharply divergent evaluator scores, split purchases, large post-award modifications, repeated extensions, and payments unsupported by inspection records. A warning would not prove misconduct, but it would trigger review before the District commits or releases additional money.

Transparency also requires enforcement and expansion, not another portal. DC law already directs the Contracts and Procurement Transparency Portal to publish executed contracts worth at least $100,000, solicitation documents, determinations and findings, amendments, modifications, and Council summaries. The next administration should enforce those requirements and add the missing performance information: final evaluation scorecards, award explanations, major deliverables, contractor evaluations, inspection records, and contract outcomes. Residents should not have to search across multiple systems or file a public-records request to determine whether a contractor delivered.

Emergency contracts already require written justification, as much competition as circumstances permit, and online disclosure within seven days. The administration should add a formal after-action review for major emergency awards, covering the price paid, vendor selected, work delivered, modifications made, and lessons learned. Urgency may justify a faster award. It should not excuse the government from reviewing the result.

None of these reforms requires a new procurement bureaucracy. D.C. already employs the people, operates the systems, and enforces many of the necessary rules on paper. The next mayor should connect those pieces and replace optional follow-through with hard stops: no renewal without a performance evaluation, no payment without proof of satisfactory delivery, and no high-risk award without documented scoring and conflict review.

3. Create Predictable Consequences

D.C. has penalties, but unfortunately lacks a reliable process for connecting a substantiated finding to every consequence the law authorizes. Existing law already gives the District substantial enforcement power. The Board of Ethics and Government Accountability can fine officials up to $5,000 per violation, censure them, and order corrective action. Officials who retaliate against whistleblowers can face discipline, dismissal, and civil fines. Most subordinate agency heads serve at the mayor’s pleasure. The Chief Procurement Officer can suspend or debar contractors for fraud, bribery, serious performance failures, and other conduct that undermines their responsibility. The False Claims Act allows the District to recover three times the damages caused by fraudulent claims.

The law also creates several referral requirements. An Inspector General or DC Auditor finding of waste, fraud, abuse, or a possible ethics violation can trigger a formal BEGA investigation. Prosecutors must notify the Chief Procurement Officer of certain contractor charges and convictions. The Office of Contracting and Procurement already publishes an Excluded Parties List.

What D.C. does not publish is one government-wide record showing whether every substantiated finding reached each office with authority to impose an additional consequence. During the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, BEGA reported that 55 of the 124 matters it closed fell outside its jurisdiction. That number demonstrates the information gap: the public cannot readily determine whether those matters reached another authority or what happened after they left BEGA.

The next mayor should direct subordinate executive agencies to adopt a written consequences protocol and seek an interagency agreement with BEGA, the Office of the Attorney General, the Inspector General, the D.C. Auditor, and the Chief Procurement Officer. Because several of those officials and offices exercise independent or protected statutory authority, the protocol should govern referrals, acknowledgments, and reporting—not dictate investigative or enforcement outcomes. BEGA operates as an independent agency, and the Chief Procurement Officer serves a five-year term with removal only for cause. The Council should codify any government-wide deadlines that the mayor cannot establish through executive authority or interagency agreement.

The protocol should distinguish among three stages. Credible evidence should trigger a confidential referral to every office with relevant jurisdiction. A substantiated finding should require the responsible executive agency to prepare an action memorandum within 30 days identifying the available consequences, the action taken, and the reason for imposing or declining each one. A final disposition, after applicable appeals, should trigger a public summary consistent with personnel, investigative, and privacy laws. Agencies should retain authority to take lawful interim steps—such as restricting an official’s contracting authority or suspending a vendor—when necessary to protect public money while an investigation proceeds.

For political appointees, accountability must remain personal to the mayor. After a substantiated finding, the mayor should decide whether to restrict the appointee’s delegated authority, require a corrective performance plan, impose discipline where permitted, or remove the appointee. If the mayor retains an appointee after serious misconduct or repeated management failures, the administration should explain that decision publicly once the matter reaches final disposition. The performance agreements described earlier should identify these consequences before a failure occurs, so the administration does not invent a standard after learning who violated it.

A published enforcement matrix should guide those decisions without turning them into automatic punishment. It should distinguish negligent errors from intentional deception, isolated failures from repeated conduct, and technical violations from conduct that threatens public money, employee rights, or resident safety. Aggravating factors should include concealment, retaliation, personal enrichment, obstruction, repeated violations, and harm to the District. Mitigating factors should include prompt disclosure, cooperation, restitution, corrective action, and reliance on formal advice sought in good faith.

Contractor enforcement needs the same consistency. D.C. already requires contractors on contracts exceeding $100,000 to certify their responsibility, update that information within 60 days of a material change, and update it again before the government exercises an option year. The District should make explicit that contractors must disclose credible evidence of fraud, bribery, significant overbilling, concealed ownership, or serious performance failures connected to District work. A disclosure should then trigger a serious review. Failure to disclose, however, should weigh heavily in responsibility, termination, suspension, and debarment decisions. This would adapt the federal government’s credible-evidence disclosure rule to DC’s existing contractor-certification system.

D.C. should also borrow the principle of conditional release used by the World Bank and reflected in the European Union’s “self-cleaning” approach. A formerly debarred vendor seeking new public work should provide evidence that it repaid improperly obtained funds, cooperated with lawful investigations, removed responsible personnel where appropriate, and repaired the controls that allowed the misconduct.

Current D.C. law caps an ordinary debarment at five years. The administration can immediately require a fresh present-responsibility determination before awarding new work to a formerly debarred vendor and treat evidence of reform as central to that decision. If the Council wants to keep a vendor excluded beyond five years until it satisfies specific rehabilitation conditions, however, it must amend the procurement statute to authorize debarment with conditional release. Rehabilitation requirements should reflect the vendor’s size, role, conduct, and contract risk. A small business responsible for an isolated control failure might need targeted training and documented invoice controls. A large contractor involved in systemic fraud might need management changes, an independent compliance review, repayment, and continuing monitoring. The District should coordinate any cooperation or disclosure requirement with prosecutors so it does not interfere with an active case or demand public admissions before due process runs its course.

Finally, the administration should consolidate existing enforcement data into one public integrity scorecard rather than create another enforcement office or glossy report. The scorecard should track referrals, acknowledgments, processing times, final dispositions, disciplinary outcomes, debarments, recoveries, and the reasons for reinstating formerly debarred vendors. It should measure whether the system acted promptly and consistently.

Predictability means applying the same process regardless of an official’s political influence, a vendor’s connections, or the amount of press attention the matter receives. No one should gain protection from consequence simply because the government divided responsibility among several offices.

4. Make Transparency Usable

The District already operates an Open Data Catalog with downloadable datasets and APIs, a procurement portal covering contracts and payments, and a public FOIA system. But those tools do not guarantee complete or timely access. Independent procurement agencies still publish through separate systems. In 2025, the Inspector General found that DCPS had transmitted none of its contracts exceeding $100,000 to the central procurement portal during the period reviewed, including all 70 contracts worth more than $1 million. At the end of fiscal year 2024, more than 1,000 FOIA appeal decisions also remained overdue for publication, though officials cleared that backlog in January 2025.

The problem does not stem from a lack of transparency laws or websites. Agencies publish information unevenly, systems do not connect, and records often appear only after journalists or residents already know what to request and where to look.

Transparency changes that dynamic by affecting behavior both before and after misconduct. An official who knows the public can trace evaluation scores, conflicts, and contract amendments has less room to steer a decision. A vendor whose performance record follows it into future competitions has a stronger incentive to deliver. Connected records also help journalists, competitors, and auditors detect favoritism, overbilling, and ignored warnings before the District renews a contract or releases more money.

The next administration should enforce existing disclosure requirements and connect the systems D.C. already operates. One searchable index should link appointments, contracts, vendors, audit findings, corrective actions, and enforcement outcomes through common identifiers. Agencies should apply the District’s existing open-data standards to those records by providing searchable downloads, permanent links, and revision histories. FOIA should serve as a backstop, not the primary way the public discovers how officials exercised power.

Denmark demonstrates the value of this approach. Its transparency model combines public access, strong recordkeeping practices, and independent review by the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Those protections help journalists reconstruct decisions and test whether officials followed the law. D.C. can expand its oversight capacity in the same way: give journalists and residents usable records, let them identify warning signs earlier, and make it harder for the government to ignore what they uncover.

Closing Thoughts

It is hard to discuss government accountability in the Elon Musk era without alarming Washingtonians. During 2025, DC recorded 30,813 federal separations and only 8,457 new hires, while the city’s chief financial officer forecast that federal downsizing could eliminate 40,000 jobs over four years. The Lewis George administration should not answer cronyism with an indiscriminate purge.

Thousands of career public servants keep D.C. running through political transitions. They often know where the broken processes, ignored warnings, and bad contracts sit. Accountability should begin at the top and follow the evidence: remove appointees who misuse authority or cannot perform, protect whistleblowers, retrain or reassign employees whom broken systems have set up to fail, and use established procedures to address misconduct.

I read Janeese Lewis George’s decisive primary victory as a critique of 12 years of Bowser-era cronyism, insider access, and tolerance for poor performance. She won more than 54 percent of first-choice votes and carried seven of the District’s eight wards—a broad mandate for a different direction.

Her administration can swap out familiar names while preserving the same habits, or it can change the systems that allowed those habits to take hold. The real test will not simply be whom Lewis George appoints. It will be whether her administration makes auditors matter, protects public dollars, imposes consequences for failure, and gives residents the information they need to judge whether their government delivers.

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Which raises a question many D.C. residents have: What exactly is the difference between DCPS and charter schools, and why does it matter? D.C.’s choice-based education system has many benefits. Unlike many places in the U.S., where families are assigned a single public school based on where they live and those who want something different will need to move or pay for private school, families in D.C. have the opportunity to choose among a variety of public options, including their zoned DCPS school, charter schools, DCPS city-wide schools, and out-of-boundary DCPS schools.

But this range of choices can also be confusing to families and community members, particularly those who moved to DC from other places that don’t have the same range of options. As someone who’s worked in and around public education in D.C. for the past two decades, and recently navigated DC’s school choice landscape as the parent of a 3-year-old entering preschool, I thought it might be helpful to provide some explainers for those seeking to understand and navigate D.C.’s education system.

This post looks at the similarities and differences between DCPS and charter schools. In the coming weeks I’ll also write about D.C.’s nation-leading universal pre-K program and the pre-K options available to D.C. families, the roles that different entities and leaders (e.g. the Mayor, DCPS Chancellor, Public Charter School Board, Office of the State Superintendent of Education, State Board of Education, and Deputy Mayor for Education) play in operating and governing D.C.’s schools, and the history of D.C. education governance. Later this year, I’ll be sharing some explainers and guides on the MySchoolDC lottery process.

But first: DCPS and charter schools? How are they different and what do you need to know about them?

DCPS and Charter Schools by the Numbers

*DCPS

**Public Charter School Board

***Office of the State Superintendent of Education, 2025-26 school year enrollment audit report data; includes students in non-public placements.

It’s actually best to start by talking about what’s NOT different between DCPS and charter schools. Both DCPS and charter schools are public schools. Both are publicly funded; free of charge for families; required to follow federal and District civil rights and special education laws; and prohibited from discriminating in admissions or employment on the basis of race, religion, disability status, or certain other factors. Both DCPS and charter schools are required to follow D.C.’s Standards of Learning and administer D.C.’s State Assessments in the grades and subjects for which they apply. Students in both DCPS and charters take D.C.’s state assessments in reading, math, and science. Families and the public can find information about school-level results on these assessments for both DCPS and charter schools, as well as other indicators of school environment and quality, in OSSE’s D.C. School Report card.

Now that we’ve gotten those similarities out of the way, what’s the difference between DCPS and charter schools?

The primary difference is a matter of governance and legal structure.

DCPS is the District of Columbia’s single public school district. Public school districts operate most public schools in the United States and, if you attended a U.S. public school outside of DC prior to moving here, odds are you went to a school operated by a school district. School districts are a type of government entity. Their teachers, administrators, and other staff are public employees, and are often represented by public employee unions (DCPS teachers are represented by the Washington Teachers Union, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers 1). Most school districts are governed by elected school boards, which hire school superintendents, approve annual district budgets, and approve contracts with employee unions, among other functions. In D.C. however (as in some other cities, including New York), that role is played by the Mayor, who since 2007 has held Mayoral Control of DCPS governance, although the Council also plays a key oversight and approval role over many key decisions (e.g. approving new union contracts and annual budgets, confirming the DCPS chancellor).2 The Mayor appoints DCPS’ chief executive (subject to Council approval), who is called the chancellor but plays the same role as a superintendent in most districts. 3

Charter schools, in contrast, are operated by independent nonprofit organizations that have received a charter authorizing them to operate a public school, under government oversight. A group seeking to open a charter school must apply to the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), the independent D.C. Government agency that authorizes charter schools. Once PCSB authorizes a charter, it carries out ongoing oversight of the school’s compliance with state and federal laws, governance, and financial and academic performance. 4 PCSB has the authority to close charter schools that are financially non-viable, have a record of sustained poor academic performance, or fail to meet goals at charter renewal (which occurs every 15 years, with a high stakes review every five). 5

As a nonprofit, each charter is governed by a board of directors, which is responsible for hiring and evaluating the school’s chief executive, approving budgets, and is ultimately accountable to the PCSB for the school’s performance. Charter schools’ boards are not elected and must include at least two parent representatives. Meetings of charter school boards are subject to open meetings act requirements, and, as nonprofits, they must undergo an annual audit and submit financial reports to the federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Some charter schools are unionized, but most are not, and unions seeking to represent charter school teachers must organize on a charter-by-charter basis.

Two distinctive features of D.C.’s charter policies have particularly shaped the charter landscape: First, unlike many states, D.C. allows multiple schools to operate under a single charter. While some charters include only a single school, the largest, like KIPP and Friendship, operate multiple campuses serving thousands of students across grades PK-12. Second, D.C. charter schools are fully independent of DCPS: they receive both local and federal funding directly, rather than through DCPS, and are responsible for fulfilling all federal and special education requirements for children that they enroll. The combination of these two factors means that charters, particularly larger ones that serve multiple grade spans, function much like their own school districts, with some notable differences related to how students enroll in them. For this reason, formal communications from D.C. government agencies sometimes refer to “charter LEAs (local education agencies),” when referring to the organizations that hold a charter rather than individual campuses.

There are also different school choice and enrollment processes between DCPS and charter schools–with important implications for families

Most (but not all) DCPS schools are zoned “schools of right,” meaning that a child in grades K-12 who lives within the geographic boundaries of a school’s catchment zone is guaranteed a slot in the zoned school for their grade level. Every home address in D.C. is assigned an in-boundary school for elementary, middle, and high school, meaning that a family can “choose” their preferred DCPS school by buying a home in its catchment area. (PreK, as I’ll discuss in an upcoming post, is a bit different). Families who want to attend a DCPS neighborhood school other than the one to which they are assigned may apply to do so through the “out of boundary” lottery process, but enrollment in an out of boundary school is contingent on availability of seats at that school after all in-boundary students wishing to attend are enrolled; in other words, children who live within a school’s catchment area have a strong advantage in admissions. DCPS also operates some district-wide or non-zoned schools, 6 including, among others Capitol Hill Montessori, School-Within-a-School, the Stevens and Military Road Early Learning Centers, and eight selective DCPS high schools and programs (full list here). Families who wish to send their child to a district-wide or out-of-boundary DCPS school must apply through the MySchoolDC lottery, which I’ll share more information about later this fall.

Charter schools, in contrast, are all schools of choice. This means that a family must choose to enroll their child in charter school, and, with limited exceptions, must do so through the MySchoolDC lottery.7 Unlike DCPS schools, however, there are no catchment zones for charter schools, so families from across the District have an equal shot at admission to a charter through the lottery. Charters are allowed (but not required) to establish preferences for student enrollment for siblings, children of founders and staff, and disadvantaged students, but are not allowed to prioritize students based on other criteria.

What does charter or DCPS status mean for a child’s day-to-day experience in a public school?

To be honest, in itself, not that much.

DCPS has adopted a number of common instructional structures and expectations (such as adopted curricula, common formative assessments, and expectations for time spent in specific subjects) that are intended to be consistent across all schools or across all schools serving students in a particular grade level/band. DCPS also provides common professional development for teachers and uses a common teacher evaluation framework. Within those common structures, however, there is significant variation among schools. Principals have considerable influence over school-level resource use, operations, and culture. Student and teacher demographics also vary widely across schools. Thus, a child attending one DCPS school can have a very different experience than a child attending a different DCPS school in the same grade level. And a family with multiple children may have different experiences if their individual school’s leadership shifts.

This is even more true when it comes to the charter label. Charter schools have significant autonomy over curriculum, staffing, and operations. Many charter schools were founded with a goal to offer a specific type of education, such as (to name just a few examples) Montessori; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM); Expeditionary Learning; or Dual Language Immersion. But not all charter schools were designed around a unique theme, instructional approach, or focus. Families considering enrolling their child in a charter school will need to learn about the individual charter’s approach and mission and determine if that focus is a fit for their family’s values and child’s needs.

In summary:

• Families in D.C. have access to a variety of choices, including their zoned DCPS school, charter schools, district-wide DCPS schools, and out-of-boundary DCPS schools.

• Both charter and DCPS schools are public schools but are operated under different governance arrangements.

• Every D.C. resident family with a student in grades K-12 has a zoned DCPS school of right, but also has the opportunity to access other school options, including charters and DCPS options other than their assigned school, through the MySchoolDC Lottery.

• Knowing whether a school is a charter school or DCPS school doesn’t tell you much about its quality, student demographics or test scores, culture, or (particularly for charters) educational approach. Families can learn more about individual schools through MySchoolDC, OSSE’s D.C. School Report Card, and DCPS and individual charter school websites.

Figure 1. Every D.C. traffic death from 1 January 2014 to 29 July 2026 (441 in total). Numbers give each ward’s total. Wards 7 and 8 account for 196 deaths, 44% of the total on 25% of D.C.’s population. Sources: DDOT Vision Zero Crash Injury Point layer, D.C. GIS.

Clark was one of 21 pedestrians or cyclists killed in traffic accidents in 2024, and one of 52 total traffic fatalities that year. His death was also a violent prelude to what was supposed to be our first year of zero traffic fatalities.

In 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser set a goal of eliminating traffic deaths in 10 years as part of “Vision Zero,” launching a series of investments in infrastructure and other initiatives meant to protect D.C. residents. The street Clark was killed on is a showcase of that effort: it had been recently redesigned – at a cost of almost $23 million – to slow traffic and create barriers meant to protect pedestrians and cyclists.

Figure 2. Traffic deaths by mode, 2011 to 2026. The 2026 bar is split: the solid portion is the 27 deaths recorded through 29 July, on pace for 46 by the end of the 2026. Sources: MPD published traffic fatality counts, DDOT Vision Zero Crash Injury Point layer.

2025 offered some relief. Fatalities fell by half, even if pedestrians bore the brunt. It appears to have been an anomaly.

This year is shaping up to be as bad as 2024: through 29 July, traffic deaths more than doubled compared to last year. Six pedestrians and cyclists were killed in July alone. And based on insurance claims, D.C.’s drivers are now the second worst in the country. It’s clear the current strategy isn’t working.

The data tell the story in three parts:

• First, dangerous driving in the District – defined here as excessive speeding – has grown dramatically over time. We can see this by looking at speed camera data, where the share of tickets for more severe violations has doubled over a decade.

• Second, dangerous drivers face few consequences. Despite recent efforts to crack down on the most egregious speed camera ticket scofflaws, many tickets continue to go unpaid. For excessive speeding violations, non-payment is worse. More concerning: active police enforcement of traffic laws has fallen off a cliff. Moving violations issued by D.C. police are at their lowest level in 15 years.

• Third, the costs of traffic violence are disproportionately borne by the poorest parts of D.C. –Wards 7 and 8 – where the data suggest the “dangerous driving – no consequence pattern” is the worst.

Vision Zero was supposed to prevent this. It is likely that absent the infrastructure improvements and speed cameras, we may have seen even more death and destruction, but until D.C. gets serious about taking dangerous drivers off the road, people will continue to die.

Figure 3. Dangerous driving is up, police enforcement of severe speeding is down, the most dangerous drivers avoid paying camera tickets, and deaths are rising. Severe speeding is twice as common east of the river. Ticket payment rates are higher than shown because of data lags, but geographical and severity trends are directionally correct. 2019 is excluded from the enforcement panel because of coding changes. Sources: D.C. Open Data, DDOT Vision Zero.

The good news is that our incoming mayor has an opportunity to chart a new, safer course, and many of the necessary reforms and policies depend more on political will than new budget requests.

Vision Zero Investments Are Real, Yet D.C. Roads Are More Dangerous

D.C. has invested heavily in physical infrastructure to address road safety and pursued other reforms that, in theory, should have helped prevent deaths.

Table 1. Vision Zero-era build-out.

From bike lanes, to lowering the default speed limit in 2020, to a massive expansion of the network of automated traffic enforcement (ATE) cameras, D.C. has invested heavily in improving road safety. And it’s been expensive – more than $400 million total between 2015 and 2024, according to the Washington Post.

And yet, traffic deaths are up. It’s true that the country experienced a surge in pedestrian deaths post-pandemic, but nationally, US pedestrian deaths have fallen for three straight years. Meanwhile, D.C.’s traffic violence continues to take too many lives.

Is this just a natural result of D.C.’s population and traffic growth? No. On a per vehicle mile traveled basis, both total traffic fatalities and pedestrian/cyclist fatalities nearly doubled from 2014-2023, the latest year for which VMT estimates from DOT exist.

Figure 3. Traffic deaths per 100 million vehicle miles travelled, 2014 to 2023. All traffic deaths rose 99% per mile driven; deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders rose 117%. Sources: D.C. Government, FHWA Highway Statistics Table VM-2.

A greater number of large vehicles also doesn’t help. Light trucks and SUVs are involved in just over half of US pedestrian deaths, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds they are more likely than cars to kill a pedestrian at the same impact speed. D.C.’s fleet shifted the same way, but the shift is mis-timed and gradual. Bigger vehicles are making crashes more lethal everywhere, but it’s not the whole story in D.C.

Speeding is Dangerous for Pedestrians – And More Common in D.C.

The risk of a pedestrian dying from a collision with a vehicle increases exponentially with speed. At 23 mph, that risk is about 10%. At 42 mph, about 50%. And at 60 mph more than 9 of 10 pedestrians will die.

We know that speeding kills; a 2014 study found that drivers who accumulate traffic tickets are more likely to be involved in crashes, the risk growing with the number of tickets. But how do we measure speeding? In D.C., we can look to the sprawling network of ATE cameras for insights into how drivers are behaving. The result? Excessive speeding – defined here as the share of tickets issued for exceeding the posted speed limit by at least 25 mph – has become far more common, up between 92% and 126% between 2016–18 and 2021–25.

Figure 4. Share of tickets for more than 25 mph over the posted limit. The top series includes 18 cameras that have been in place since 2010. The second series is all cameras; some retired, some added. The two lower series show that the trend is not sensitive to the 2020 unposted speed limit change from 25 to 20 mph. Sources: D.C. Open Data, D.C. GIS. Camera locations matched to posted speed limits.

In D.C., Camera Tickets a Poor Deterrent

Despite dangerous speeding being more common, drivers face a low likelihood of any real consequence. D.C.’s ATE network was advertised as a safety measure, and it has grown accordingly, from 117 sites in 2010 to 223 today. Research suggests cameras can deter dangerous driving. When Ontario banned ATE in 2025, speeding — captured by the now-neutered camera network — increased. In the D.C region, the evidence is less clear. A 2024 Washington Post analysis found D.C.’s cameras cut crashes in their immediate vicinity. Elsewhere? Not so much. But speed cameras are only a deterrent insofar as there are consequences. Unlike in the United Kingdom, camera tickets in the U.S. generally don’t result in license demerit points. In D.C., no accumulation of camera tickets, at any speed, in any quantity, can lead to license suspension or other sanctions.

And in D.C., even financial penalties are hard to extract.

Much has been written about the inability of the D.C. government to collect fines from drivers who accumulate ATE violations. Data suggest more than 30% of all camera tickets are never paid, and the number is above 50% for non-residents. The 2024 STEER Act authorized the D.C. Attorney General to sue out of state drivers who owe unpaid fines. As of March, OAG has secured judgements against 15 of the most egregious speeders totaling more than $608,292, in fines, penalties and fees. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have also been recovered by seizing scofflaw vehicles. But litigation and towing are tedious and time-consuming. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of drivers have racked up more than $1 billion in unpaid tickets.

Figure 5. Share of camera-ticket dollars collected in 2025, by ward and severity. Actual collection rates are uniformly higher as data are not updated regularly, but differential patterns are likely to persist. Source: D.C. Open Data, Moving Violations. Recent data are available here.

D.C.’s ATE data also show that the most dangerous drivers are less likely to pay their tickets; payment rates for the most egregious speeding violations are about a third of the payment rates for the mildest violations. And payment rates are lowest in Wards 7 and 8, where violations are the most severe. Until there is a more efficient and effective way to compel payment, many dangerous drivers will continue acting with impunity.

Police Enforcement Has Fallen Off A Cliff

Unlike camera tickets, officer-issued tickets come with real consequences. A driver who receives three officer-issued tickets for driving 21 mph over the posted speed limit in a 24-month period risks losing their license. A driver cited for aggravated reckless driving – 30 mph above the posted limit – can lose their license immediately.

The problem? Officers have all but stopped traffic law enforcement.

Figure 6. Tickets for 21 mph or more over, by issuer. This chart uses 21+ rather than the 25+ threshold used elsewhere because of code changes in 2019. Dashes are 2026 pro-rated from five complete months to 31 May. Includes citations from all local and federal police agencies. Source: D.C. Open Data.

Officers issued about 2,700 tickets per year in 2010 and 2011 and averaged 1,310 a year across 2010-2019. In 2025 they issued 225. Enforcement also changed character over time, becoming more reactive. In 2019, 9.4% of officer-issued violations involved a crash, presumably as part of the process of assigning blame. In 2025, that share rose to 15.9% – less proactive enforcement.

Some of this is likely due to the outsourcing of traffic enforcement to cameras. But police enforcement of traffic laws is also a contentious and politically charged issue.

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association, for instance, is opposed to armed traffic enforcement based on concerns about racial profiling and increased risks of fatal police encounters. They point to a 2021 study of state-patrol stops that found no association between greater police enforcement and crash rates. But state patrols tend to enforce highway traffic, not urban areas like D.C. More than 80% of the crashes in that study were in rural areas. A more relevant study from 2014 looked at the impact of a well-publicized enforcement campaign in Massachusetts, finding that greater enforcement reduced crashes.

The status quo in D.C. is bad news for traffic safety. Cameras that fail to deter the most dangerous drivers, and limited law enforcement backstop.

When Pedestrians Die, It’s Hard to Hold Drivers To Account

Consequences for dangerous drivers who take lives are also not certain. D.C. does not publish data on the share of traffic deaths that result in charges or convictions, but anecdotes and national data suggest serious charges are rare – if an offender is identified.

• Only about half of hit-and-run drivers are ever identified. The driver who killed Ronnie Clark is in that category. Roughly one pedestrian death in five is a hit-and-run.

• Even when these drivers are identified, they are often able to avoid serious sanction. For instance, in 2018, 68-year-old cyclist Thomas Hollowell was killed on his bike near the National Mall by a driver who ran a red light and fled the scene. The driver was eventually identified and convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but sentenced to only 18 months in jail – the longest term available given the charges.

• Part of the problem is the difficulty of building cases when drivers flee the scene. Officers must not only find the vehicle, but also establish that a particular person was behind the wheel. The July arrest of a woman for an April hit-and-run in Foggy Bottom is illustrative. An accompanying, 112-page affidavit lays out in meticulous detail the two-month process by which officers linked the driver to the crime, using a compilation of dozens of traffic and private cameras and witness interviews.

For drivers, the incentive to flee is high. Since 2013, D.C.’s criminal code allows for a maximum 6-month jail sentence for drivers charged with “leaving after colliding.” Other charges can be stacked, but the incentive is clear – run, and it will take months for investigators to build a case. If they ever find you.

Wards 7 and 8 Take the Brunt

Calls for more police enforcement of traffic laws are not popular, and we shouldn’t discount the risks that come with more police interactions. But the disparate impact of traffic violence must be part of the conversation. Analysis of national trends reveals a racial gap in traffic deaths, especially when it comes to pedestrians. In D.C., wards 7 and 8 are majority black and poorer than their west-of-the-river counterparts and are home to a disproportionate number of traffic fatalities.

Figure 7. Traffic deaths per year by ward, before the pandemic against the five most recent full years. D.C. draws its wards to roughly equal population. Source: DDOT Vision Zero Crash Injury Point layer.

As illustrated in Figure 3, this disparity has grown over time. Compared to the city as a whole, wards 7 and 8 have higher rates of excessive speeding, lower camera ticket payment rates and saw a greater drop-off in police enforcement of traffic laws.

Every death is a tragedy, but it’s worth putting this problem into perspective. In the decade from 2015 to 2024, 30 people were shot and killed by police across the city.1 During the same period, 171 pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders died from traffic violence, 61 of them in wards 7 and 8 alone.

What to Do

The next D.C. mayor has an opportunity. It’s true D.C. is facing a difficult budget situation and massive new capital improvements focused on road safety are unlikely to be fiscally possible. The good news is there are many low-cost and even revenue-increasing reforms that would likely have a real impact.

Laws and coordination with Maryland and Virginia

• Finalize reciprocity. Maryland Senate Bill 173 would authorize Maryland to enter reciprocity agreements. Once such an agreement is in place, Maryland could refuse registration to a driver delinquent on D.C.’s camera tickets, the same rule applying to D.C. drivers who ignore Maryland tickets. The bill takes effect 1 October if passed. A similar agreement with Virginia should be a priority while the Governor’s office is held by a Democrat. Collecting unpaid fines from non-D.C. residents is both a safety and budget imperative.

• Stiffen leaving after colliding. The maximum sentence for fleeing a crash resulting in an injury is 180 days, and sentences may run concurrently with other charges. Requiring consecutive sentencing would reduce the incentive to run. Better yet? Make it a felony to leave the scene of an accident that results in a serious injury.

• Extend intelligent speed assistance beyond reckless-driving convictions and consider it for dangerous driving caught on camera. D.C.’s STEER Act was the first U.S. law to mandate speed limiters for repeat offenders.

Camera enforcement

• Continue with lawsuits. The Attorney General has won judgments. Publicity around lawsuits likely serves as a deterrent to excessive accumulation of tickets, even if litigating one driver at a time is not scalable.

• Use the STEER Act escalation ladder. The STEER Act created a vehicle points system under which ten points in six months makes a vehicle eligible for booting and towing, and DPW has gone from two boot teams to ten as of 2024. Expand the teams, and consider citizen reporting as a means for identifying the worst offenders.

• Revisit Clean Hands exemptions. Under the Clean Hands Act a license can be withheld from an applicant owing the District more than $100, but reforms introduced earlier this decade excluded debts to the D.C. DMV – including camera tickets. It is important to have some discretion to avoid shutting down businesses, but egregious violators should not be afforded this loophole.

• Enforce D.C. vehicle registration requirements to improve collection. Virginia lets non-residents register vehicles there, and about 14,000 D.C. drivers hold Virginia tags. Of the 103 most-ticketed vehicles in FY2025, 67 carry Virginia plates and 25 Maryland. D.C. already requires residents to register vehicles in D.C. It should pass a law that imposes stiffer penalties for D.C. residents who drive dangerously while operating out-of-state registered vehicles absent a qualified exception.

• Attach license demerit points above a camera ticket severity threshold. This is difficult and without obvious precedent in the U.S., but other countries do it. This sanction should be reserved for the worst offenses. Such a move would likely require legislation and technical improvements to existing ATE cameras to accurately identify drivers.

Police enforcement

• Increase enforcement of traffic laws. Ticket-writing has all but disappeared. Enforcement campaigns and regular enforcement shifts will help fill gaps in the camera network and ensure the most dangerous drivers face actual penalties.

• Charge reckless driving at the statutory threshold. D.C. law defines reckless driving as 20 mph or more over the limit; aggravated kicks in at 30 over. Very few non-criminal reckless driving citations are filed in D.C.

• Assess performance of MPD district commanders. This does not mean ticket quotas, but rather outcome-based assessments. D.C. already runs CompStat-style accountability on crime; traffic injuries and deaths belong in the same review.

• Publish a traffic injury and fatality disposition dashboard, and clearance rate when charges are pursued. More information will help D.C. residents and advocacy organizations hold elected officials and agency heads accountable.

D.C. has spent a decade working toward Vision Zero, with little to show for it. The next mayor has a chance to chance course, and make the city safer for all of us.

Methodology and Appendix

Fatalities come from DDOT’s Vision Zero Crash Injury Point layer, a person-level record in which each row is one person killed, carrying mode, ward, date and coordinates. It is the only D.C. source that identifies who died rather than how many, and it reconciles with MPD’s published annual totals in every year from 2011 to 2025. Counts run to 29 July 2026 and the layer lags roughly two weeks. Enforcement comes from D.C. Open Data’s Moving Violations file, pulled for all 197 months from January 2010 to June 2026 (about 25 million citations).

The violations file does not say whether a human or a camera issued a ticket, so issuer is inferred from four signals that agree with one another: presence of a driver’s date of birth (93-99% on human-issued agencies, 16% on the two camera agencies), presence of a license state, the M-versus-I value in the violation type field, and disposition codes that only a camera can generate. Officer counts include MPD districts plus federal and other human-issuing agencies. Severity is measured by violation code; a consistent “more than 25 mph over” series is T122 plus T123 before August 2019 and T822 plus T823 after, when D.C. retired the older codes. That changeover makes 2019 unusable for the higher band, so 2019 is excluded from comparisons that use it, and analysis of officer enforcement uses the 21-mph-and-over band, which spans the change and is also the threshold at which license points attach.

Ticket payment cannot be compared across years: D.C. freezes each monthly extract when it is exported and the lag varies, so a ticket paid after export still reads as unpaid. Collection rates in this piece are therefore within a single year, where every cell shares one measurement window, and true collection is higher than the figures shown.

Appendix

Figure A1. Deaths, officer tickets and camera tickets. Open markers are 2026 at the current pace. Sources: DDOT Vision Zero Crash Injury Point layer, D.C. Open Data.

Table A1. Share of tickets for 21 mph + over the posted limit. D.C.’s camera file carries usable coordinates only from 2016, so the two speed-limit rows cannot be built earlier. 2019 is excluded from every comparison because of a coding change mid-year. Speed limits are DDOT’s current posted values.

Note: We updated several typos. The earlier version of this article read “with the same rule applying to Maryland drivers who ignore D.C. tickets” and now reads “with the same rule applying to D.C. drivers who ignore Maryland tickets.” Another repeated prose. We also moved a reference to an Israeli study about ticket accumulation up in the text.

Like the Mamdani campaign to which she invited comparisons, Lewis George actively courted the YIMBY vote down the stretch. Zohran Mamdani’s approach in practice has been a mix of encouraging moves on overall housing affordability, like upzoning and permitting reform, along with counterproductive slopulism like the rent freeze. Paul Williams of the New York mayor’s transition team called a version of Lewis George’s social housing plan unworkable for increasing housing supply, and a preponderance of evidence points to supply being the most important thing you can do to broadly drive down housing cost.

Rendering of the Washington Commanders’ future home of RFK Stadium among new mixed-use residential on the Anacostia River.

Lewis George has taken bullish positions on housing production in areas such as zoning to help earn primary endorsements from GGWash and DC YIMBYs. The draft RFK Campus Master Plan, which enters the final two weeks of public comment period, could illuminate the style of YIMBY that Lewis George will bring to the mayor’s office. Not so much her statements between now and Aug. 14, but more so beyond that with an eye to communications and actions through mid-2027 when we hit zoning review.

Much like anyone with a pulse in politics after 2024, JLG hammered the word affordability in her campaign. The District of Columbia’s rent-to-income ratio has dropped from its peak last decade, but as the nation’s capital gets walloped with job losses and economic contraction, further decrease is critical for providing relief to current residents and persuading new ones to come pay taxes here. Housing makes up close to one-third of the average household budget in Washington, D.C., and sits right around the rent-burdened line of 30 percent.

Facilitating downward pressure on housing costs is perhaps the most direct and impactful way to address affordability. Austin’s metro area has the nation’s lowest rent-to-income ratio and Minneapolis lands at fourth. JLG’s North Stars are both good ones and also do represent different levels of ambition, as Minneapolis city numbers would be roughly maintaining the relatively strong existing pace from the Bowser Era, while Austin levels would represent a bold acceleration in supply.

To hit any of those marks, Lewis George will likely need to manage coalitional tensions around zoning, city control, and labor with some of the parties that got her here, as she did on her RFK redevelopment yes-vote. This dance should provide clues as to whether we truly have a supply-pilled incoming administration that boasts any shot at her five-year goal of 72 thousand homes.

Degree of city control for Kingman Commons

Kingman Commons is the one parcel for residential in the entire draft RFK Campus Master Plan where DC hasn’t chosen a developer and leaves many details to be decided, including what kind of housing and public vs. private ownership. It’s the smallest of the RFK plan’s three residential districts, capped at approximately 1,300 of the site’s 5,000 to 6,500 total units that overall have 30 percent designated as affordable.

Riverfront is projected at around 3,100 units and Plaza at about 2,200, both more than double the ceiling of Kingman Commons (renamed from Kingman Park District). Both sit inside the Washington Commanders’ 28-year ground lease and those two are no longer a decision for the mayor or Council.

An RFK site rendering that features earlier versions of a few names: Kingman Park District is now Kingman Commons, Riparian Area and Anacostia Riverwalk are not Anacostia Commons, and the light green plot with The Fields at RFK is now the Recreation District."

Lewis George’s Green New Deal for Housing Amendment Act was viewed as an alternative to Mayor Bowser’s public-private approach to development, and didn’t make it out of Council. That bill’s DNA lives on in her current campaign platform advocating for two-thirds social housing with the remaining third of market rate housing meant to subsidize it. This includes tenant leadership boards given a say over building management and community rules. Again, a housing expert tapped to Mamdani’s transition team said he told JLG’s team that this plan would not lead to an increase in housing supply.

Look for clues on the new mayor’s approach from the forthcoming Request for Proposal in terms of affordability requirements, whether the District takes a public equity stake giving it more ongoing control, and whether it favors a mission-driven or nonprofit developer over a field of private bidders.

Stadium-adjacent zoning flexibility

DC doesn’t have to look far for evidence that stadium-adjacent zoning can seed a housing boom. Navy Yard’s transformation into the DMV’s fastest-growing residential corridor tracks closely with the Nationals Park opening, and Capital One Arena did something similar a decade earlier for Chinatown and neighborhoods close to downtown. We saw the Council and Mayor Muriel Bowser both seize the wheel upon realizing the Capitals and Wizards weren’t bluffing about Potomac Yard, and it’s because these teams do create important downstream effects in the District. It’s critical to leverage economic engines like these with tailored processes. Zoning relief, like Los Angeles is starting to deploy for their 2028 Olympics hosting gig, can then become a repeatable playbook for housing production.

The votes Lewis George has been faced with since joining the Council in 2020 lack any sort of great analog for the Ward 4 Councilwomen’s approach by the river upon becoming mayor, outside of being a Yes vote on redeveloping the RFK site.

Her voting record does however suggest an affinity to the type of procedural friction that constrains housing in other downstream ways. It features opposition on the 12-1 passage of the Eviction Moratorium Public Safety Exception Emergency in April 2021, 10–3 final passage of the RENTAL Act in September 2025, and 9–4 passage of the TOPA reconsideration amendment in October 2025. While those are datapoints for our priors, the campaign posture has been fairly pro-upzoning this spring and summer. The outcome of the parking garage flashpoint from public comment could be instructive but might also be tough for mapping onto a clean YIMBY read. RFK master plan adoption is expected by the end of 2026, zoning text and map amendments get filed in early 2027, and Zoning Commission action follows sometime in mid-to-late 2027.

The likely new mayor’s North Stars of Austin and Minneapolis got it done by loosening procedural friction. Since the supply-pilled YIMBYs have transformed the conversation, perhaps zoning deference has made its way from abundance folks to being adopted firmly in the DC progressive zeitgeist. Lewis George did campaign on the missing middle in housing and directly referenced RFK as a target for that. At the very least, the zoning approach down by the new site of the Commanders will provide another directional signal on the degree to which the city’s housing stock is subject to countervailing procedural friction.

Labor and affordability tradeoffs

The stadium and its adjacent hotels already carry a Project Labor Agreement, along with a 51% DC resident hiring requirement and a $15 million Certified Business Enterprise carveout. What’s not locked in is how much of that framework extends to the site’s housing districts.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute implored extending PLA to mixed-use district construction, and this did not make it to the text of the Robert F. Kennedy Campus Redevelopment Emergency Amendment Act of 2025. The cost premium jumps from negligible to upward 20% depending on sector and methodology in PLA studies, but it gets complicated and that would be for another very long article.

Nationals Park fell short of its labor goal of 50 percent of journeyman construction hours performed by DC residents. More recently the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Anacostia near Nats Park and downriver from RFK, wrapped in 2021 with more than 60 percent of its apprentices being DC residents per the Baltimore-DC Metro Building Trades Council. It’s safe to assume the new mayor will want that outcome from enforcement and monitoring to continue with quite a different beast of a project.

It will be interesting to see how Lewis George and the Council close the gap DCFPI flagged, and whether she’s willing to reckon publicly with what PLA coverage could mean for unit costs and construction timelines. Her North Stars of Austin and Minneapolis assume a pace of building that a more extensive PLA could slow down. This is among the genuinely tough tradeoffs faced in an executive governing role.

Which kind of YIMBY?

The comment period for the draft master plan closes Aug. 14, just past the one-year mark since the Council’s first RFK vote. None of the three questions above will be resolved by that deadline. Zoning text doesn’t get filed until early 2027. The debate over how the PLA extends to housing continues. The Kingman Commons procurement process hasn’t concluded and won’t for some time.

What these early signals from the RFK site offer is a read on how Lewis George balances the many labor, zoning, and public-private dynamics facing DC in the waning years of the 2020s.

It will indicate whether the YIMBY banner will be raised with an acknowledgement of markets, or if YIMBY and affordability were both just bumper stickers to slap on the back of whatever else the incoming administration already wanted to do. These instincts will shape many housing and business development projects in the city, and hint at the prospects of the mayor and Council avoiding enough ideological traps to truly crack the code on affordability.

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We will discuss the pros and cons of potential revenue measures and what they would fund in subsequent posts, but I want to begin by looking at tax collections and policy over the past decade to better orient the conversation. (Last week’s post on where the District gets its money is here.)

Councilmembers and our next mayor, Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, have framed the upcoming debate as needed after “kicking the can down the road.” Mayor Bowser similarly described the budget as “kicking the can down the road” in declining to sign it, but from the perspective of delaying difficult spending decisions.

While it is certainly true that the Council kicked the can down the road on both revenue and spending in this budget, this framing is misleading with respect to tax policy overall. The Council has not shied away from approving revenue measures over the last decade. Over the last decade, the Council has increased taxes and fees on top earners, businesses, commercial property, utilities, sales, mansions, hospitals, gas, cars, and sports betting.

To be clear, these revenue increases have funded critical services like Metro (which I ride daily) and the new paid leave program, but to imply the District has resisted raising revenue to both support existing services and create new programs is simply not accurate.

To have a substantive debate about revenue that carefully weighs the tradeoffs around economic growth and retaining and attracting the upper-income residents who increasingly sustain our tax base, we first need to be honest about what District tax policy and collections has looked like over the last decade.

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District Tax Revenue and Income Tax Revenue Per Capita

Tax Revenue Per Capita, FY 2016–2025

The following four charts track the District’s tax revenue over the last decade. (Governmental-funds tax collections divided by resident population, shown in both nominal and inflation-adjusted (constant 2025) dollars. Fiscal year runs Oct 1–Sep 30.)

Key takeaways

1. Nominal growth is steep: Total tax revenue per resident rose about 51% from FY 2016 to FY 2025, and income tax revenue per resident rose about 95%.

2. Real total tax revenue per capita is moderately higher: In constant 2025 dollars, total tax revenue per resident rose ~13% over the decade, peaked near $16,350 in FY 2022, fell back to about $15,000 by FY 2024, then rebounded to $16,033 in FY 2025.

3. Income tax revenue outpaced inflation: Real income tax revenue per resident grew about 45%, reflecting the District’s increasing reliance on income and capital gains taxes relative to property and sales taxes. The increase is not solely attributable to the District becoming wealthier, as the overall personal income tax rate increased by about a point over the last decade.

The District’s Chief Financial Officer echoed these general trends in a February 2026 update to Mayor Bowser and the Council, noting strong income tax collections and weak sales and property tax collections.

While individual income tax collections are stronger than expected, the other major source of growth is gross receipts tax revenue, driven by policy actions that increased hospital inpatient and outpatient fees. Somewhat offsetting the strong growth in income and gross receipts taxes are declines in sales and deed tax collections.

Total tax revenue per capita

Figure 1. Total tax revenue per resident — nominal dollars.

Figure 2. Total tax revenue per resident — constant 2025 dollars (CPI-U adjusted).

Income tax revenue per capita

Figure 3. Income & franchise tax revenue per resident — nominal dollars.

Figure 4. Income & franchise tax revenue per resident — constant 2025 dollars (CPI-U adjusted). (Note: Real non-income tax revenue per capita has declined since 2016 from $9,220 to $9,055.)

Figure 5. District overall personal income tax rate

Tax Increases Over the Last Decade

The following chart captures the many ways the Council has raised additional revenue over the last decade. When the District’s elected leaders tell residents that we have a revenue “problem,” that’s not the case. Additional revenue can certainly be part of a longer-term solution to our fiscal strain, but reinvigorating our economy and controlling spending must be central given that spending has outrun a decade of new revenue, including significantly increased income tax collections.

• On the income tax, the top of our bracket system was restructured in 2021: the Council capped the existing 8.5% bracket at $250,000 and added new high-income brackets on top of it. Under the new schedule, income between $250,000 and $500,000 is taxed at 9.25%, income between $500,000 and $1,000,000 at 9.75%, and income above $1,000,000 at 10.75%—up from a previous top rate of 8.95%. The three brackets below $250,000 were left unchanged. The D.C. income tax brackets are not indexed to inflation, so they capture more income over time. Limits on SALT deductions at the federal level also reduced upper-income filers’ ability to deduct increased District taxes from their federal taxes.

• In the case of the Universal Paid Leave payroll tax enacted in 2016 and implemented in 2019, two-thirds of the revenue collected from the tax—$345 million per year—now flows to the General Fund, not paid leave. The tax was cut from 0.62% to 0.26% when the program had a surplus, but the Council raised it two years later to 0.75%, with excess funds being used to fill budget gaps. Councilmember Elissa Silverman has called this out to her credit, which I noted during the campaign.

Sources & Notes for Tax Per-Capita Charts

Tax revenue: DC FY 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, Exhibit S-1E (Tax Revenues by Source, governmental funds, modified accrual). Population: DC FY 2025 ACFR Exhibit S-4A (U.S. Census July 1 estimates); FY 2025, absent from the ACFR, uses the Census December 2025 estimate (693,645). Inflation: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U, all items, U.S. city average, calendar-year annual averages (1982-84=100); real figures are in constant 2025 dollars.

“Income tax” follows the ACFR grouping: individual income tax plus corporate and unincorporated-business franchise taxes. Individual income tax alone was about $3.14 billion in FY 2024 (roughly 73% of the group).

Caveats: calendar-year CPI is matched to each Oct–Sep fiscal year as an approximation; the Census revised its 2024 estimate down to 691,310 in the December 2025 release, so the FY 2024→FY 2025 step mixes population vintages; figures cover tax revenue only and exclude federal grants and non-tax revenue such as fees and fines.

The RFK Campus Master Plan’s 45-day public comment period closes on August 14. The stadium will be built for 2030. But a number of coalitional dynamics continue to pose questions as to what kind of steward the Council and incoming mayor will play in the rollout, aimed to reinvigorate a contracting local economy and pull Washington’s NFL franchise back to District soil.

Tradition of aversion

Lewis George is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and political categories like progressive, socialist, and leftist aren’t evergreen. Many district residents are probably curious as to whether after winning 60% of the Democratic primary vote she governs like the typical 21st century conception of a progressive or something different, good or bad. However you disaggregate or combine these factions, they’re typically united to varying degrees in an aversion to building inevitably subsidized sports stadiums.

JLG’s final Yes vote came after securing amendments, but still drew fire from her downballot campaign mate on essentially the DSA ticket. Ward 1 CM nominee Aparna Raj said this vote “chose to prioritize developer profits over renters’ lives and found money for a billionaire’s stadium” before steering away from this topic as her campaign leveraged support from the mayoral frontrunner down the stretch. It likely wasn’t a topic of conversation between their adjacent tents at election day vote centers.

Lewis George posted that she “stayed at the negotiating table to secure good union jobs for DC residents” as union money and infrastructure played a critical role in her winning campaign, providing a key cross-pressure in the typical affinities of the anti-stadium demographic.

This winning coalition includes key voting blocs who tend to say that the Nats Park success at Navy Yard was due to flukey economic growth conditions and made possible by MLB offering more home games than the NFL. They cite studies that don’t love the general case for subsidized sports venues, and then apply it to the thesis that a new neighborhood around a stadium would not produce more housing than alternative theories could accomplish on the RFK site. It’s definitely a debate to have.

Perhaps because it came out before the draft master plan release, GGWash did not add any RFK site questions to its 53-part questionnaire that landed at a Lewis George endorsement. They declined to re-up with Ward 3 CM Matthew Frumin a second time after he was the last defection to Yes, and blunted its Charles Allen endorsement for Ward 6 CM by expressing their disappointment in his approval vote.

Proponents would note that Nationals Park spurred the development and revenue to help pay off its debts a decade ahead of schedule. That a federally-muscled metropolis sandwiched between two affluent states provides a flawed analog for the median stadium-financing result found in the existing literature. That DC’s souring fiscal situation changes the calculation on this kind of swing. That like one might in his ward’s East Potomac Park, Councilmen Allen had to play the ball where it lies.

The shrewd choice by all defectors was vindicated by a comfortable result in June’s primary. And with that are signals the mayor and DC Council could be more amenable to the pro-growth mindset on this particular issue than they would’ve back at the start of this decade.

Public opinion shift

It was far from a zero-risk decision by both Lewis George and Allen as campaign season heated up. JLG drew criticism from DSA — Raj having served as DC chapter head — which provides a door-knocking army to work the city’s porches for a summer Democratic primary in deep blue territory. Allen led the “Hail No” petition and represents a ward with more lukewarm polling on the project compared to the popularity in its home located a few blocks east in Ward 7.

At-large CM Robert White was a fellow 2022 letter signatory and went No on the final vote before winning his DSA-endorsed campaign to replace Eleanor Holmes Norton as congressional delegate. DSA- and GGWash-endorsed Ward 5 incumbent Zachary Parker voted Yes but was not on the Council at the time of that opposition letter sent to Norton. CM Christina Henderson, an independent, did like Allen journey from No on the 2022 letter to Yes in the 2025 votes, though her seat was not up in the 2026 cycle.

Allen, Parker, and Lewis George in early election season bucked a faction that tends to view subsidized stadiums and tax incentives for large businesses negatively on the fighting oligarchy axis. Whether any of them would’ve chosen differently as the deciding vote is an unknown universe. It’s important to note the mood has shifted dramatically and there are many concurrent explanations unique to DC.

Councilmembers surely take public opinion into account while organically their own thinking evolves in parallel to constituents. There are plausible theories as to how the landscape changed on bringing Washington’s NFL franchise back to the RFK site, and the factors probably started to compound.

It would be great to have polling on the relative importance of these events for DC residents. Here’s my take as to how that might be laid out, so you all can tell me the real order in comments:

1. Dan Snyder giving up ownership

2. Experience of nearly losing Caps/Wiz to VA

3. DOGE/WFH double-whammy on budget and what kind of swings the city must now take

4. The success of Navy Yard and stadium successes elsewhere

5. The Commanders in 2024 making their deepest run of the century

6. It feels like it’s already happening so just get on with it

7. Positives emerging from the September 2025 plan

(Please drop your order down in the comments!)

A top motivator for elected officials is often realizing where the inertia is headed. Lewis George said before the final vote that “stadium deals make my stomach turn” and positioned the Yes vote as an effort to improve terms before the train leaves the station due to federal pressure.

It was also critical for a mayoral candidate hailing from the northernmost Ward 4 to keep the bottom from falling out in the mostly Southeast Wards 7 and 8, where combined support for the deal hit plus-29 points in a Spring 2025 Washington Post-Schar School poll. Getting on the right side by June 2026 paid off in the win over top challenger Kenyan McDuffie, an early Council proponent, as JLG only ran a few points behind her citywide margin in those wards. Meanwhile, Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder was an early and avid backer of getting the project launched.

Voting to approve the RFK redevelopment defanged what could’ve been an advantage for McDuffie, on an issue that is especially animating down by where the future housing and business development project is set to occur.

Sports as political organizing

It is also possible that the ones traditionally thought of as saying things like “sportsball” to get some sort of reaction at a Super Bowl party have just made a savvy about-face. No one is running a mean pick-six anymore, hopefully.

We saw NYC-DSA get as much mileage as they can out of the Knicks’ name and iconography ahead of their June primaries. They started organizing World Cup watch parties. Raj held her election night event at the sports bar Franklin Hall, which Lyft had ranked among the top 10 in the country for ride hails during World Cup matches. DSA-propelled mayor Brandon Johnson watching Chicago potentially lose the Bears to Indiana, not the type of thing they talk about now.

In 2023, Metro DC DSA posted that “football is the 21st-century equivalent of gladiatorial combat and doesn’t merit taxpayer encouragement” while urging “councilmembers to oppose any giveaway to the Commanders. If that means the team winds up moving elsewhere, that will be only to the city’s gain.” Making the football bad/soccer good distinction when the Commanders are king around these parts, that seems unwise. The party vibes around this social entry point in organizing are too important to be the turd in the punchbowl when it comes to the return of DC’s prodigal son.

It can’t be lost on JLG that New York mayor Zohran Mamdani converted pure joy in sports fandom into organizing momentum for his backed candidates in their own June primary. The benefits of such aura farming redounded with each De’Aaron Fox decision (like it was some shootaround), or injured Eastern Conference star the Knicks got to dodge. No available data on whether or not the Zohran slate won in spite of this ad.

A victory parade is an opportunity and it’s momentum. Young people who have spent their formative years in Covid-spurred isolation have an event where they can find community. Where they can just enjoy the sports and avoid being negative or online for three seconds.

Lewis George went and paid for ad producers that worked on Mamdani’s campaign. Safe & Affordable DC, her aligned independent expenditure committee, carries that central affordability messaging. It’s a lineage tracing down I-95 that may continue to manifest itself in the stadium and land development process.

The process moving forward

Raj will almost certainly win the general election to replace Ward 1 CM Brianne Nadeau, who had joined Robert White in opposition for the 11-2 vote confirming the return of NFL home games to DC. It’s the only ward where White outperformed Muriel Bowser in the 2022 primary. This has been the ward of Take Your Sportsball Back to Maryland.

Judging from Franklin Hall and the absolutely prohibitive line outside for USA-Belgium, you wonder if the vibe shifted in a way that Nadeau and Raj might begin approaching the issue differently than in the past. That you can build something on the bet that it expands the pie and produces more revenue for the public services DC residents rely on. We’ll see if the Council adopts changes during the lame duck session including Nadeau and under Bowser, the deal’s key driver.

Most of the prominent organizations opposing the relocation outright have gone quiet on the matter. It’s mainly Friends of Kingman Park Civic Association organizing for the public comment period, as of mid-July, for largely their tangible neighborhood matters of pavement and parking garages. My next piece will dive more into the latest on the remaining players shaping these fine details.

The Commanders are that popular. Landover is that much of a pain. Now elected officials from different schools of thought get to see what comes out of public comment and then together, perhaps enthusiastically, shape how this gets built.

In fiscal year 2024 (October 2023-September 2024), the District raised about $11.9 billion in revenue. We rely on revenue tools that most places split between levels of government—a state-style income tax along with a local property tax, business franchise taxes, sales taxes, parking fees, and traffic fines. (A common theme you’ll see across policy issues is the District’s unique structure as both a state and city complicates its governance and makes comparing us to other states and cities more challenging.)

Nearly all of this nearly $12 billion flows into the General Fund, which pays for schools, police, health care, trash collection, and the rest of day-to-day government. (The figures below cover our own-source revenue. They do not include federal funding through grants and Medicaid reimbursements.)

General Fund revenue by category

Individual income tax

$3.14 billion: 26% of own-source revenue

Our largest source of revenue is the income tax. The District uses a progressive structure with higher segments of income taxed at higher rates—starting at 4% on the first $10,000 and climbing to 10.75% on income above $1 million. Collections tend to grow faster than wages themselves because the rates rise with income. Collections also tend to swing with the stock market, as capital gains and bonuses are also reflected in the income tax bucket.

Who pays the income tax

Tax year 2022 · the top ~12% of filers pay about two-thirds

The income tax’s weight sits overwhelmingly at the top. The breakdown below uses the most recent data from our CFO. Filers earning $200,000 or more, about one in eight in the District, supply roughly two-thirds of the income tax. Households above $1 million, fewer than 1% of filers, account for about a quarter of it. At the other end, the nearly 60% of filers earning under $75,000 together pay less than 10%, as we would expect under our progressive structure.

Middle and upper middle class taxpayers are vital to the District’s progressive tax base. White-collar professionals—picture a household headed by two federal employees or two nonprofit lawyers—are central to making the numbers work.

Keeping these taxpayers in the District is critical to fiscal sustainability, as this is not New York City replete with billionaires with hundred-million-dollar penthouses. For comparison, filers earning more than $1 million in New York City account for roughly 40% of personal income tax liability. The District is more reliant—as a share of income tax collected—on the middle and upper middle class filers earning between $200,000 and $500,000.

Note: this distribution reflects tax-year 2022 liability (about $2.73 billion), an earlier and slightly smaller figure than the $3.14 billion in FY 2024 collections cited above. The shares are stable.

Property tax

$2.92 billion · 25% of own-source revenue

A close second is the tax on land and buildings. Homes are taxed at a low rate ($0.85 per $100 of the home’s assessed value), while commercial buildings — offices, hotels, and the like — are taxed at roughly double the rate and supply the larger share ($1.65-$1.89 per $100 of value, depending on whether the property is valued at under $5 million, between $5-10 million, or greater than $10 million). Property tax revenue is most exposed to the economic health of Downtown, as we are currently seeing with falling property values in the city’s core.

On the residential side, a range of policies, including the Homestead Deduction and caps on annual increases, hold down bills for homeowners, seniors, and residents with disabilities. (As a reminder, federal government buildings, embassies, universities, and religious institutions pay no property tax.)

Sales and use tax

$2.00 billion · 17% of own-source revenue

The District’s third revenue pillar is the tax on purchases. The general rate is 6%, but the system is tiered: restaurant meals are taxed at 10%, hotel stays at nearly 16%, and commercial parking at 18%. Much of this revenue comes from visitors, conventions, and downtown foot traffic, so like commercial property taxes it is closely tied to tourism and office activity. (The general rate is scheduled to rise to 7% in October 2026.)

Business taxes

$1.13 billion · 10% of own-source revenue

Businesses operating in the District pay a franchise tax of 8.25% on the net income they earn here. It comes in two forms: the corporation franchise tax, which raised about $932 million, and the unincorporated business franchise tax, roughly $201 million, which applies to partnerships and similar firms. These collections are volatile and fluctuate with the broader economy.

Payroll Taxes

The District levies a true payroll tax: an assessment on employers that funds the Paid Family Leave program. On July 1, 2024, that rate rose sharply — from 0.26% to 0.75% of covered wages. For most of the program’s life, every dollar raised by the tax was dedicated to the leave fund and stayed outside the General Fund entirely.

That changed in FY 2025. Under current law, any revenue the tax collects above what the Chief Financial Officer certifies is needed to keep the leave fund solvent is now redirected into the General Fund for general use—an estimated $76 million in the first year and about 2/3 of the revenue collected by the tax.

This is the first time paid-leave taxes have funded anything other than paid leave. This shift began just after FY 2024 it does not appear in the chart, but this is an important revenue source to watch, particularly as the Council and incoming Mayor begin to discuss revenue more seriously.

Other taxes and fees

$1.00 billion in other taxes · $1.69 billion in non-tax revenue

The remainder comes from a long tail of smaller sources. On the tax side, this includes deed recordation and transfer taxes paid when properties are bought and sold, the estate tax, the Sports Facilities or “Ballpark Fee” (tax on businesses with $5 million or more in gross receipts) to cover the bonds issued to finance Nats Park, taxes on public utilities, insurance premiums, and telecommunications, and excise taxes on things like gas, cigarettes, alcohol, and vehicles. No single one is particularly large by comparison, but together they add up to about a billion dollars.

Beyond taxes, the District takes in significant non-tax revenue: fines, licenses and permits, charges for services, interest earnings, and the net proceeds of the DC Lottery. A further category—special-purpose (“O-type”) funds analogous to user fees—comes from fees and assessments that are dedicated to the agencies that collect them. Combined, these non-tax sources contribute are about $1.7 billion.

Federal Impact

One driving factor behind the District’s revenue situation is the federal government. Government buildings, embassies, universities, and religious institutions occupy a large share of our most valuable land but pay no property tax on it. Federal law also bars the District from taxing the income of the hundreds of thousands of commuters who work in the city but live in Maryland or Virginia. Those constraints narrow our tax base and help explain why the individual income tax carries much of the load.

Later next week we will continue our tax series with a look at how the revenue picture has changed over the last decade.

About these figures. Amounts reflect fiscal year 2024 gross General Fund collections as reported by the Government of the District of Columbia, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Office of Revenue Analysis, in D.C. Tax Facts 2025. “Own-source” revenue excludes federal grants, Medicaid payments, and other federal transfers, which fund a large additional portion of the District’s roughly $21 billion total budget. Figures are shown gross of dedicated transfers to funds such as WMATA, the Housing Production Trust Fund, and the Washington Convention Center.

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In the weeks leading up to the primary election we were able to put together a range of content on housing to crime to education, and now that I’m back from vacation and have had time to think about building this community over the long-term, I wanted to share what’s next for Capital Commonsense.

We are formally launching this week with a roster of contributors that I’m thrilled about. They have deep backgrounds in a range of issues from economics to education and we hope to build this bench of contributors over time. We will be publishing a couple times a week, prioritizing how the District works and important policy debates.

There’s a real desire for content that helps District residents understand their government and how it works in our community. We’re going to explore basic questions that have an outsized impact on the lives of District residents, and whether the District is going to be a city that supports growth and opportunity and remains a place where families want to live and raise their children. These are the types of questions we’re going to explore:

• Where does the District get its money and how does it spend it?

• What are the differences between the DCPS and charter school system and how does the lottery work?

• Who is covered under the District’s health care programs?

• How does the District’s social safety net compare to neighboring states?

• What was the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Act and how does it impact us today?

One of the things I’ve observed through ANC work is how the policy debates are made worse by a general lack of awareness of the policy baseline, how District government functions, and how both of these factors impact our day-to-day lives. For example, in discussing revenue and spending, is there a general understanding of what we tax and spend today and how that compares to our neighbors? The answer I often find is “No.”

In another example, I’ve been struck in recent months by coverage in my neighborhood of the community’s dismay about the struggles of Barracks Row in Southeast and closure of many long-time independent restaurants. But why are independent restaurants struggling? What are the policy choices and broad economic factors at play? How can District leaders address the issue? These are the types of questions we’re going to seek to answer.

Looking ahead to the many important policy conversations expected to take place this fall and under a new Council and Mayor in Janeese Lewis George next year, we want to help root the discussion in an improved understanding of the status quo and what it takes to change it for the better.

We’re glad to have you with us as Capital Commonsense enters its next chapter. Later this week, we’re going to kick off a conversation about taxes.

The Capital Commonsense Team

So, I wanted to lay out my thinking, how I weighed various factors, and be fully transparent about where I agree and disagree with both candidates. To start, while I’m ranking McDuffie first, I disagree with him on a number of policies, including eliminating speed cameras and preserving historic districts that make it harder to build housing. I also don’t think we should consider freezing property taxes.

Before looking at specific issues, I want to make a broad, overarching point. If I lived in New York City, I would have voted for Zohran Mamdani. While I don’t agree with him on every issue, he made concrete moves to reassure skeptical voters—particularly on crime and education.

He went on Fox News to apologize to the NYPD. He pledged to keep Jessica Tisch on as Police Commissioner. He changed his position on eliminating the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

Changing your mind in public service is good, and I felt confident in how Mamdani would govern.

I can imagine a world where Lewis George had taken similar steps to reassure skeptical Washingtonians and I could have ranked her first. I am, after all, the typical urbanist who should vote for her. I don’t drive and haven’t owned a car since college. She and I have similar attitudes about the benefits of walkable city life.

I also understand the frustrations with Mayor Muriel Bowser and city services. I share them—my trash hasn’t been picked up several times this year. And while I think she has handled the Trump administration’s pressures about as well as any mayor could given the power imbalance between the federal government and the District, I completely understand why Washingtonians find Councilmember Lewis George appealing. Everyone in my social circle who has met her says she’s a passionate and thoughtful person.

However, she has not done nearly as much as Mamdani to reassure left-of-center voters given the District’s unique economic and fiscal challenges and her longstanding positions on crime and education. The primary reassurances I have gotten on this front are from her supporters.

If she wins the race, I hope she takes seriously what Councilmember Henderson told the Washington Post:

I think her position as mayor will be very different. And I know it’s very uncomfortable for people to sort of trust in that because they haven’t seen it displayed on the council. But I just think the reality of anyone when they get to be the chief executive is that you’re not just governing for the groups that endorsed you. You have to govern for the whole city.

Economy

To state the obvious, the District is facing massive economic challenges. These challenges did not begin with DOGE, but DOGE has greatly exacerbated them. Before federal layoffs accelerated in 2025, Washington was already struggling with the aftereffects of the pandemic and increased remote work, including a slow return-to-office for federal employees under the Biden Administration.

Downtown office vacancy rates have climbed from roughly 14% before the pandemic to more than 20% today—among the highest levels in the nation. Blocks of office buildings remain partially empty, depressing commercial property values and reducing the tax revenue that funds services. More than a dozen office-to-residential conversion projects are now underway because much office space is no longer economically viable in its current form. While these conversions are welcome, they nonetheless reflect underlying weakness in commercial real estate, one of our most important sources of economic activity and revenue.

Against that backdrop, DOGE delivered another blow with mass layoffs. According to our Chief Financial Officer, the District lost more than 22,000 federal jobs in 2025, removing around $3.7 billion in annual payroll from the local economy. Across the region, more than 100,000 jobs disappeared as federal cuts rippled through contractors and nonprofits. The result has been increased unemployment, declining commercial activity, and an economy that contracted by 8.3% in late 2025. If D.C. were a state, we would have one of the weakest economies in the nation.

To turn things around, we need to attract major private-sector investment that creates jobs and sustains the tax base that supports our social safety net, which—contrary to how it is portrayed by many activists—is among the most generous in the country. We have among the most generous health care programs in the country. We offer universal pre-K. We have among the highest TANF benefits in the country. We provide universal paid family leave.

The District has a robust social safety net to support, and we need economic growth to continue to fund it. I think Kenyan McDuffie is the most clear-eyed about our economic challenges and the need to improve our business climate to attract major private sector investment.

Taxes and Spending

At a moment when downtown remains weakened and federal employment is shrinking, the District simply cannot afford major new spending programs and tax increases that make it harder to attract and retain residents, employers, and encourage private-sector growth. To be clear, this concern applies to both candidates’ plans. I don’t believe McDuffie’s new spending programs are any more realistic than those of Lewis George.

Adjusted for inflation, D.C.'s local spending is up by more than 20 percent since the pandemic, while recurring revenue growth has not kept pace. According to the D.C. Policy Center, local fund spending grew roughly 35 percent between FY2020 and FY2024, compared with 17 percent growth in recurring revenues. A $5.6 billion structural gap was filled by pandemic aid, prior-year surpluses, and one-time transfers. This year the Council is poised to draw down our reserves to fill gaps in operations.

Against this backdrop, we already ask more of high-income residents and businesses than most jurisdictions in the country. The District’s top income tax rate is among the highest in the U.S., and it was just increased six years ago. Under a proposal from Councilmember Brianne Nadeau to impose a local version of the federal Net Investment Income Tax or NIIT, Washington would have the highest tax rate on non-wage income in the country. (The District taxes W-2 and capital gains income at the same rate.) Our business franchise taxes also exceed those of many competing jurisdictions.

On top of this, Lewis George wants to impose a Business Activity Tax (BAT) that would incentivize firms to relocate and shift more of their economic activity to Maryland and Virginia. The BAT was originally conceived as part of comprehensive tax reform that would lower other business taxes — not as a standalone measure. In better economic circumstances and in the context of comprehensive tax reform, I would most likely support a BAT. Enacting it now, after we’ve already raised the universal paid leave payroll tax significantly, makes us less competitive at precisely the moment we need to be more competitive to fill the economic hole left by DOGE and remote work.

I say all of this as one of the most tax-positive people you’ll find. I worked for years in the Senate and Administration to advance policies to both raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations and ensure taxes owed are paid. I very much believe in tax fairness.

But our economy is in a deep hole, and if the U.S. economy were in a deep hole it would not be the time for major national tax increases either. We need to carefully consider the trade-offs of further tax increases when we desperately need to attract and keep high-income residents in the District to support our tax base. It’s much easier to move to Arlington or Bethesda, where services and schools may be better, than to renounce one’s citizenship and exit the United States.

To be clear, this is not to say that people earning $500,000 or $1 million per year couldn’t afford to pay more to pay more. It’s a question of whether another tax increase will push more of our tax base across the river and prevent us from attracting wealthier residents we need to sustain our tax base.

Crime

To level set, it’s important for voters to understand that the District is a high-crime city compared to its peers, particularly New York City. My views are shaped by this reality.

Lewis George is the most left member of the Council on crime, as I’ve written about. She was the only “no” vote against legislation to address violent tenants and violent crime in a year with 274 homicides—the most in decades. When two teenagers were shot and killed in broad daylight, she released a statement that led with the lack of grocery stores in the neighborhood, not enforcement against the perpetrators and a focus on illegal guns.

Her rhetoric has improved since that statement, which I give her credit for. This week she said explicitly she would see to emulate Baltimore’s approach to crime, which has driven homicides to their lowest rate in decades. Baltimore seeks early interventions with the relatively small group of people at risk of perpetrating or being victims of gun violence and has recommitted to strong prosecution of violent crime.

But despite some better rhetoric, she has been one of the loudest voices against teen curfew zones, showing some unwillingness to moderate her views to align with MPD leadership and the broader wishes of District voters. McDuffie has drawn a sharp contrast, backing curfew zones and repeatedly calling on the Council to pass emergency legislation that Lewis George and her allies have blocked.

To be clear, McDuffie has made statements and cast votes on public safety I don’t agree with. In 2020, he publicly questioned whether MPD funding should be redirected and said of the existing approach, “it is not working and we need to change the approach.”

But like many Democrats who went too far left on this issue around 2020, he has moderated—and that shift matters. I would much prefer a Democrat who learned from the party’s mistakes on safety than one who is more committed to a far-left view on the issue.

Education

Both of my parents were teachers, and beyond my parents, I owe much of my success in life to my public school education in New Jersey. I had access to tracking in 1st grade, a wide range of AP classes, and a rigorous curriculum — including Latin and Economics — that prepared me for college. I think the move away from reform, standardized testing, and accountability in the Democratic Party has been a serious mistake. Thankfully, this trend is reversing.

Public school is an essential service, but beyond resources, we need to maintain standards commensurate with that status. D.C.’s public schools have genuinely improved over the last two decades. On the 2024 NAEP assessment, D.C. fourth graders posted the largest math score improvement in the country—an 8-point gain over 2022 that tied for first nationally.

The pandemic-era backslide was unfortunately the continuation of a decade-long national slide, but DCPS bucked that trend. Over the past decade, DCPS students gained 0.8 grade levels in reading and 0.7 grade levels in math. This is a modest improvement, but it’s still an improvement.

I worry that Councilmember Lewis George threatens this progress. She is proud to say she would eliminate the IMPACT program, implemented in 2010 to improve teacher quality and accountability and reward high performers with meaningful bonuses. IMPACT has been studied extensively by Stanford and UVA researchers, who found it produced real student achievement gains — particularly for children in high-poverty schools. For more on IMPACT, please read Jordan Weissmann’s stellar piece from earlier this week.

Eliminating IMPACT has been the top demand of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) for 15 years. Lewis George, endorsed by the WTU, gave a revealing answer on IMPACT when pressed—questioning its value while declining to defend the evidence behind it. She was asked about how she would replace IMPACT on a City Cast interview, and gave this non-answer:

A lot of people say there goes Janeese again. She doesn’t want to punish anybody.

No, no. We want to create an evaluation system that makes sure that our teachers are teaching our young people and also, you know, retaining the teachers we need in our city.

“An evaluation system that makes sure our teachers are teaching and retains teachers” is not an answer that reassures me on accountability and standards.

Beyond IMPACT and my general concerns about lowering standards and weakening accountability, I am concerned that Lewis George would not stand up to the WTU on tough issues when needed.

The WTU’s track record makes this fear concrete: the union fought school reopenings during the pandemic so aggressively that the city was forced to seek a temporary restraining order in early 2021. And earlier this year, the union campaigned to close schools during a severe winter storm. Mayor Bowser had schools open on a delay by Thursday when surrounding jurisdictions were closed all week. School is an essential service and it needs to be open like an essential service. In the same circumstances, I believe McDuffie would have opened schools— and Lewis George would have kept them closed. WTU is also of course skeptical of charter schools, which about half of District children now attend, although Lewis George has given encouraging answers on funding for charter schools this year.

City Services

City services is an area where I give Rini Sampath an edge over the top two candidates. Sampath has relentlessly focused on getting back to basics and delivering basic services. One of my concerns about a McDuffie mayoralty is whether he would adequately address the major gaps in city services Washingtonians experience. As I noted, my trash collection has been missed multiple times this year, not including the snowstorm.

Housing

On housing, I think McDuffie and Lewis George are comparable on land use issues and zoning, but McDuffie takes the collapse of housing investment and the potential for mass foreclosures in our affordable housing ecosystem much more seriously. Housing projects are simply not penciling in the District in this environment and addressing land use will not fix the issue. (Our guest post from Matthew Yglesias linked above goes into much more depth on housing so I’m not writing much here.)

The June 16 primary is an incredibly consequential election. The District is in a deep economic hole, and we need a mayor who is clear-eyed about that reality. For all of his shortcomings, which are real, I believe he is more likely to put Washington’s economic and fiscal health and public safety first. That is why I am ranking him first.

The councilwoman seems to genuinely care about both student and teacher wellbeing. She has a record of working on important, non-ideological issues like getting broken HVAC systems fixed so kids don’t boil on warm days. She very appropriately says her top education priority as mayor would be tackling DC’s truancy crisis.

The problem is that, for seemingly well-meaning but misguided reasons, Lewis George is planning to dismantle successful education reforms that have helped the District achieve more than a decade of progress on math and reading. Above all, she has said she wants to “end” IMPACT, the pay-for-performance system in place since 2009 that rewards our best teachers with large bonuses while cutting loose our worst.

This issue has earned oddly little attention during the campaign, possibly because it’s a bit abstruse compared to something like a brawl at Chipotle. Lewis George also tends to downplay the topic; her plans to ditch IMPACT only get a short, vague bullet point low down on her official education platform, though she’s been more upfront in interviews and questionnaires. But it’s a potentially profound change that would affect DC’s schools for years, if not decades, to come.

Lewis George has only offered a fuzzy outline of how she’d replace today’s system. But her public statements suggest we could wind up with a weaker alternative that puts less emphasis on concrete measures of student success. Speaking as a DC public school parent, that leaves me deeply concerned.

DC’s Schools Have Been Getting Better

Stepping back for a moment, I think any conversation about how to improve K-12 education in D.C. needs to start by acknowledging three basic points.

The first is that our schools obviously face some daunting challenges. We’re a large urban district where a huge chunk of children are struggling with poverty, mental health, and neighborhood violence, frequently while trying to learn English as a second language. None of that is easy to overcome in the classroom.

The second is that our schools could still be much better. Too few students are mastering fundamental skills, to say nothing of more advanced material. It isn’t tolerable that just 15% of D.C. high schoolers are proficient in math while less than 40% are in reading.

The third is that, in spite of all their handicaps, our schools have still made some remarkable gains over the last 15 years. We were the country’s fastest improving school district or state during the 2010s, measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Our students have recovered quicker from COVID learning loss than in any state with enough data to measure, according to a report released last month by Education Scorecard.

As the New York Times recently noted, reading scores in most states have crashed far below their 2015 levels — but not in DC. Instead, we’re one of five states (or state-like entities) where reading scores are now higher than they were that year. That makes us a rare good news story in a time of collapsing academic performance.

Skeptics will sometimes suggest that DC’s progress is just an illusion created by gentrification. But while it is true that the influx of wealthier white students into our public schools has helped increase test results, researchers at the Urban Institute and Mathematica have shown that changing demographics alone cannot explain the city’s gains. Just a quick glance at kids’ scores over time suggests much the same: The share of Black students scoring proficient in reading on DC’s standardized CAPE exam roughly doubled over the last decade, despite COVID. Math proficiency has improved dramatically among white 8th graders.

IMPACT has been a part of our success

That brings us back to IMPACT, which was the centerpiece of former Mayor Adrien Fenty 2007 education reforms. The idea, which was admittedly a bit more in vogue then than it is today, was to attract and retain the best teachers by treating them like other skilled professionals, pairing incentive pay with high standards.

If for some reason you want to wade deep into the weeds of how IMPACT works, you can check out this 58-page handbook. But in brief: Every year, educators are evaluated on five different measures, including their classroom teaching methods and students’ standardized test scores. Those components are then blended together into a single rating; the best performers, deemed “highly effective,” get bonuses of up to $25,000 in high-poverty schools, and $3,000 in low-poferty ones. The worst performers — the fewer than 2% each year who are deemed “highly ineffective” — are fired, with just a handful of exceptions. Teachers are also dismissed if they fall into the second lowest category, “minimally effective,” for two years running.

IMPACT was controversial from its start. The Washington Teachers Union opposed it for weakening its members’ job protections and its emphasis on test scores, among other reasons. Hundreds of teachers were dismissed after being rated ineffective during the program’s first couple years, and the backlash helped sink Fenty’s reelection campaign. It didn’t help matters that his polarizing schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, appeared on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a broom, as if she was going to sweep out some trash.

Still, IMPACT survived. And all of the rigorous research we have suggests that it worked basically as intended. The canonical studies on this issue — by teams from the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Brown — found that when teachers rated “ineffective” left schools, they tended to be replaced by better-performing educators, and students’ results improved. Even though some effective teachers exited too, turnover had an overall positive impact on achievement — suggesting the good of the policy outweighed the bad of any “instability” it created, as one DCPS report noted.

The same was true later years, after IMPACT underwent revisions that lessened its emphasis on test scores. What’s more, a separate paper found compelling evidence that the system was spurring educators who stayed in D.C. to improve their teaching skills. (Mathematica’s research also found that Fenty’s broader set of reforms, including IMPACT, bore fruit).

Nonetheless, nixing IMPACT has remained one of the teachers’ union’s major goals. Now it’s backing Lewis George, who has promised to deliver on it.

The arguments for ending IMPACT are weak

Her case for doing so strikes me as fairly flimsy.

First, Lewis George has echoed the union’s claim that IMPACT is fueling a teacher turnover crisis. Yet our retention rates have risen since the system was introduced, and are now roughly in line with other big cities. Last year, about 10% of teachers left DC’s schools; that’s below the 11.1% average turnover rate in urban school systems covered by the American School District Panel and the most recent average of 12.8% in the large urban school districts tracked by ERS.

In an email responding to some of my questions, Lewis George’s campaign also criticized IMPACT as being racially biased, based on a high-profile 2021 study by American University that found white teachers score 17 points higher on the scale than Black teachers on average. But much of that gap appears to be driven by the fact that black educators tend to work at schools in poorer neighborhoods, and you could probably erase some of the difference by giving educators more points for doing just that.

Finally, she told DC Citycast that IMPACT focuses too “punitively on test scores” rather than teachers’ “competency.” Yet only 25% of its rubric is currently based on standardized test results, compared to 50% when it very first rolled out. More than half is based on factors like in-classroom observations of a teachers’ skills and their commitment to the school community.

At most, it seems like there’s a case for reforming parts of the system, which D.C. has done in the past. But to “end” it would be a mistake.

Her plan to replace IMPACT raises questions

Again, Lewis George has not outlined exactly how she would replace IMPACT. But she has said she would collaborate with the teacher’s union on revisions. And in an email responding to some of my questions, her campaign suggested she might seek to emulate Montgomery County’s Teacher Professional Growth System:

There are plenty of alternate, effective models which use quantitative tools to support teacher retention and development. Councilmember Lewis George supports teacher evaluation models that focus on development and continuous improvement of staff. One potential model is Montgomery County Public Schools’ Teacher Professional Growth System (TPGS) where experienced teachers help train and support both novice and underperforming teachers to improve their craft. We must hold teachers accountable for student achievement (including their test scores) while leaving room for principals to identify the individual strengths and weaknesses of their staff. We want a system where teachers who are excellent stay, where teachers who can become excellent are supported in rapidly mastering their craft, and where teachers who aren’t likely to become highly effective move on to other roles better suited to their skills.

Under MoCo’s process, which it debuted in 2001 after developing it in partnership with its own local union, teachers are graded primarily based on classroom observations, and are placed on a professional improvement plan if they don’t meet certain set standards. If they fail to shape up, they can eventually face termination. But it doesn’t happen very often. As Bethesda Magazine noted, 550 teachers lost their jobs due to performance issues in the roughly two decades after the system was implemented, while another 475 resigned after a bad review. That’s a rate of just over 50 exits per year in a system that stands at 14,000 teachers today.

That Lewis George intends to keep at least some weight on test results is relieving, but we can all see where this would be headed: A much less demanding teacher assessment system where objective data on performance take more of a back seat. In general, the candidate has said she wants to cut back on testing for students too, though her campaign says it has no plans to move away from CAPE.

And look, some parents might think they prefer that. Testing fatigue is real. We all want to support our kids’ teachers, who work hard and face enormous stress.

Here’s the thing to consider: Researchers have found that most evaluation systems fail to distinguish much between high and low-performing teachers and don’t actually improve student outcomes. The vast majority of educators just get easy passing grades and move on. IMPACT is unusual in the simple fact that it was well-designed enough to succeed at identifying talent in the classroom who could do a better job helping kids learn. It seems foolish to give that up for something untested.1

Our next mayor should obviously take the views of teachers seriously; it’s also both wrong and self-defeating to treat their unions as an adversary to squash, the way conservatives tend to. But like any large, organized group, teachers are sometimes right about issues and sometimes wrong, and you generally want political leaders who are impartial enough so that they can make a fair judgment about their demands. Lewis George, on the other hand, comes from a progressive activist world that tends to view educators and their labor leaders as the most important authorities on how we ought to run schools, and wave away contrary evidence even when their desires are in tension with parents’ or students’ interests. When it comes to education reforms, I think that impulse is leading her, and potentially the city, down the wrong path.

About the author

After spending fifteen years as a journalist, I recently became the editorial director at PPI, a center-left think tank that has championed charter schools and K-12 accountability among its many causes. Early in the mayoral campaign I acted as an informal, unpaid advisor to the McDuffie team on issues mostly related to housing policy. But I’m primarily a dad who is more or less pot-committed to living in this city and would like to see it, and its public schools, thrive. You can probably find me on weekends standing over my grill in Petworth.

Correction: The original version of this post stated that turnover at DCPS last year was 12%. It was 10%. The 12% figure covers all schools, including charters that don’t use IMPACT.

Serving as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner has caused me to change my mind on many issues. The ones I’ll discuss today are economic and housing development, which are particularly relevant in the current moment with the District experiencing a localized recession.

Before I became a Commissioner, I was generally dismissive of the idea that the District’s business climate and regulatory environment had much impact. No longer.

Our Commission hears regularly from those building housing and retail across Ward 7. Over the past several years we’ve been confronted with major challenges in our housing ecosystem, as projects have been delayed, modified, or scrapped all together due to failure to secure financing and our economic environment.

One of the developments we receive frequent updates on is Parkside in Ward 7 near Minnesota Avenue and Kenilworth Gardens. We were given one such update in November 2024, and the extent to which the business climate, in particular retail theft and rent nonpayment, was chilling development and impacting the ability of operators to manage housing shocked me.

Keep in mind, this was November 2024, long before the DOGE job cuts even began and nearly two years after the expiration of the pandemic eviction moratorium.

In today’s post I wanted to share directly what I heard in this meeting from City Interests. I have heard similar stories since, including that there is essentially no current demand for retail investment in the District. (The lengthy discussion of this project begins around 50 minutes into the meeting for those who care to watch.)

As I and our guest contributors articulate concerns about the potential direction of the District under a new mayor, these are the real-life conversations and stories that motivate our thinking.

Now that’s not to say that District leaders should just do the bidding of private sector interests, but they do need to take their concerns far more seriously than they currently do.

Here’s the feedback I heard in November 2024:

I’ll say retail, what we’ve been seeing lately is that retail across the District is in a tough spot. I think we’ve had more troubles because we’re trying to create a new retail node. I would say from from everything that that I’ve heard just out out in the real estate world relating to retail that the suburbs are on fire in terms of retailers wanting to go opening up new locations, the District’s been very tepid because of crime, or perceived crime, as one of the items, and the minimum wage, where like places like new restaurants are looking and having trouble penciling, you know, paying everybody the 18 bucks, that’s been a big response that we’ve got, which has been extremely disappointing.

As some of the folks on here know, from the retail working group meetings we have quarterly with residents, we actually were extremely close to signing a grocer for the site, a 25,000 foot grocer that would have gone on 12 H1 on this photo that you’re rendering that you’re looking at. They backed out after we had exchanged two or three drafts of the LOI.

We were pretty much final in terms of signing that and moving on to the lease, because they, they had updated sales projections for their urban locations, and they ended up discarding every single urban store that they were looking at, which was highly disappointing.

One of the big ways for a site that has no retail to kind of get a jump is to get that anchor tenant, and the other folks will kind of fall in line, but I mean you’re seeing even with, with like with Skyland, where they have Lidl, who has had its own issues with with theft and lesser sales than they hoped, and some of that, you know, retail space remains vacant there, so it’s definitely been a challenge, you know, we have been trying to get a grocery store for this site for, you know, really since 2004 I mean, it’s been a food desert, it remains a food desert, Artillie mentioned it earlier when, when we were talking about the bottle bill, I mean, there’s, you know, two and a half grocery stores, or you know, three three east of the river.

I don’t know if you even count the Safeway at East River Park as a full one, because I don’t think they’re very attentive and focused on it, which is why the folks who live at Parkside don’t go there, even though it’s, you know, half mile away and so it’s a dire need, you know. I think with the other opportunity that we’re trying to bring here, it’s.. I think it’s coming. It’s just.. it’s taken longer than we had ever thought or hoped.

Asked for more information about the concerns articulated by the potential grocer:

I can tell you just from our experience, they, they went from paying a or offering where we had agreed upon a reasonable rent. I mean, I, you know, rents for retail space vary wide, wildly, and grocery stores are probably, you know, towards the lower end of the spectrum, because they are that anchor that that brings the smaller tenants who will pay higher per square foot, but they went from paying a number that was like in the high teens to saying they could pay zero based on their updated projections.

And so that’s that’s where the deal, and we had gone through, we had gone through the process, like with parking, is always a big concern. We had provided 90 to 100 dedicated spots, which they were looking for, that close to four to one for four per 1000 so 25,000 feet. They wanted 100 spots. We’d incorporated some green space that the community was looking for. We, you know, we had really gone through a lot of detail, and you know it. We’re still discussing with them, but you know it’s not an imminent item like we thought it was. This was back in July.

I will say, from a just from a perspective of investor interest, and looking at the district, there is a notable difference in valuations between the district and the close in suburbs, Montgomery County, PG, Arlington, etc. like retail or multifamily investments are usually measured or sold on on cap rates, which is taking the income and then applying a cap rate to it, and so an apartment building that sells maybe at a 5% rate, which is taking the income divided by .05 in the District, or in Arlington is selling at like 150 basis points more in the District, and that’s due to a number of factors that we probably don’t have time to discuss, but I’m sure you’re all familiar about ERAP and everything that’s been going on with that, and the amount of non-payers.

I can say just from our experience, Vesta Parkside has has experienced that, I mean, we have a building that is 95 plus percent leased, and our quote unquote economic occupancy of that building is in the low 80s at the moment, because we have folks who have racked up enormous balances, and we have not been able to do anything about it to remove them from basically squatting at the site, so until that stuff changes, I think you’re going to see less investor interest, unfortunately, in the city, which is kind of trickles down to to a lot of asset classes and down to the to the bare bones spaces.

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