Budget season is in full swing, and, like in past years, the D.C. Council has a vastly different vision for the city’s fiscal future than the mayor. The split centers on how to handle D.C.’s expected financial downturn, with Mayor Muriel Bowser focusing on stimulating D.C.’s economic growth to increase the tax base, and council members working to preserve programs that serve the city’s most vulnerable.
After months of delays, Bowser announced her $21.8 billion proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year in late May, with hopes of “growing our economy, rightsizing spending, and investing in our shared priorities.” In addition to investments in RFK stadium and tax breaks for businessess, the budget proposes changes in policies and reductions in services at agencies like the Department of Human Services (DHS), the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS), the Department of Behavioral Health (DBH), and the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA), which oversee a variety of programs that make up the District’s homeless services.
If Bowser’s budget is implemented, D.C.’s most vulnerable, who depend on programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Rapid Rehousing program (RRH), and community support workers (CSWs), could see drastic changes. But the budget first has to go through the council, which held budget oversight hearings over the past few weeks. Lawmakers, including At-large Councilmembers Christina Henderson and Robert White, and Ward 1’s Brianne Nadeau have pushed back on the budget’s seemingly oversized impact on the city’s most vulnerable populations.
At a June 5 DHS budget hearing, councilmembers raised concerns with proposed changes to the TANF program within DHS. The program, which provides cash assistance to low-income families, would enforce stricter job search requirements on recipients and issue sanctions for those who failed to meet the requirements, cutting their benefits by as much as 25%. The proposal would also cut the cash assistance increase meant to account for inflation that is usually baked into the budget, and remove adults who’ve been using TANF for longer than 60 months from the program. There are currently approximately 6,500 households that have received TANF for greater than 60 months, according to a DHS spokesperson in a statement to Street Sense.
In the budget hearing, Nadeau gave a harsh critique of what she sees as a return to draconian welfare policies D.C. did away with by extending TANF benefits in its FY2018 budget, especially without the use of a working group, which the agency usually uses to pilot policy changes.
“We were looking at data [before the 2018 budget] that shows the 60-month cutoff was arbitrary and has no context about what’s going on in a person’s life,” Nadeau said as she reminded the interim head of DHS the city had been down this road before 2018. “The sanctions weren’t working. The sanctions didn’t work. The only thing that worked was the buy-in from folks that said, ‘No, we need incentives.’”
Recently, DHS paused the admission of new families into the Family Rehousing Stabilization Program, also known as RRH, until end of FY25. The budget proposes removing the 90-day lease-up strategy for the programs which means DHS can work longer with families to find housing that’s still affordable once the 12-month subsidy is gone. From DHS’s perspective, the policy change means families’ experience with shelter may not be brief, but it hopefully won’t reoccur 12 months down the road, thanks to the extra time and assistance from DHS. From the council’s perspective, longer stays in shelters burden an already overtaxed system. With only 144 slots currently available in shorter-term family housing, Nadeau is worried about potential capacity issues if families can’t move into housing through RRH and have to stay longer in shelters. (Single adult shelters have been full for months.)
When the city ran out of capacity in the past, the District put families in hotels, an option the city would struggle to afford with a $1.1 billion budget decrease created by Congress and an expected $1 billion shortfall by 2029 resulting from the loss of 40,000 federal jobs, according to financial projections by the city’s chief financial office. Congregate shelters like the recently opened Aston, and a still under-construction second congregate shelter at 25 E St. in Northwest D.C. were offered by DHS as solutions for capacity issues, but Nadeau and Henderson were skeptical that the two non-congregate shelters alone would be enough to fill the need. Bowser is also proposing as part of the budget process to allow families to stay in congregate shelters, like the old D.C. General, reversing an earlier change.
Many people in the homeless services system also rely on DBH, which Henderson, who chairs the Committee on Health, noted in the June 2 DBH budget hearing had no new programs in its proposed fiscal year 2026 budget. DBH’s operating budget was cut by 8.1 million, 2% from the previous fiscal year. “There’s no new programs, no new enhancements,” Henderson said.
The proposed budget would also cut DBH’s Community Support Worker (CSW) hours for each client the agency serves in half, from 200 units to 100 units, or from 50 hours to 25 hours, to incentivize clients to use more clinical services like therapy or psychiatric treatment. CSWs practice under the supervision of someone with a clinical license and provide direct support to individuals and families dealing with mental health or substance use challenges by helping with medication management, taking clients to appointments, and helping clients navigate the health care system and follow care plans. Last fiscal year, the units were cut from 600 to 200, which was approved because most clients used 200 units or less. But the cut in this budget concerns Henderson, who said only 36% of DBH clients use less than 100 units in 180 days, before hours renew.
“This is a shift,” Henderson said at the DBH budget hearing. “Are you going to come back next year and ask for 50 [units]? Are we phasing out? Let’s just be honest with people. Is the intention to phase out community support services?”
“We’ll look at the data and make that determination based on our experience,” the director of DBH, Barbara Bazaron, responded.
Due to congressionally imposed cuts to the FY25 budget, D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH), which helps coordinate homeless services, couldn’t onboard new team members; however, the proposed budget fully funds the agency’s seven positions, DMMHS told Street Sense in a statement.
At DCHA, which provides public housing to low-income residents, the proposed budget delays money the agency uses for property improvements and the rehabilitation of uninhabitable housing by a fiscal year. Instead of receiving $51 million for capital improvements in fiscal year 2026, the agency will receive $26 million this year and then another $26 million in fiscal year 2027. While this may appear like a reduction, DCHA only utilized 42% of its capital budget in 2024, White said at the May 30 budget oversight hearing. DCHA’s proposed budget did not include another $7 million for maintenance and repair, which the council added last year.
Henderson said the cuts initially caused alarm.
“An initial glance, it’s ‘oh my gosh the mayor’s cutting capital funding for DCHA by half’ but if we haven’t even started spending the money we already had planned for this year, there is, I think, some space for catch up,” Henderson said.
When Keith Pettigrew, the executive director of DCHA, was hired in 2023, he came in intending to fix a public housing system left in disrepair after a damning 2022 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report found unliveable units in its public housing properties, low occupancy rates, and poor management of its voucher programs.
When Pettigrew was hired, the occupancy rate in D.C.’s public housing units was 73%. It’s now above 84%, according to his testimony at the budget oversight hearing. Pettigrew plans to have a comprehensive redevelopment and rehabilitation plan by the end of the year.
With 1,300 offline and 1,083 vacant units, there are 2,383 total housing units unused by DCHA, according to the agency’s testimony. Units can be vacant but not offline or ready to be occupied for a variety of reasons, like being uninhabitable due to building infrastructure issues, or waiting for Section 18 designation from HUD to be redeveloped with a private developer. DCHA expects to bring 800 units a year online, or make them livable, within the next year, with Pettigrew’s more aggressive rehab plan promising to increase that number. Currently, of the 1,083 vacant public housing units, 71 are ready to be occupied.
The average cost for repairs is $53,000 per small unit and $76,000 per large unit, according to testimony from Daniel Dening, deputy director of capital construction and design for DCHA. The agency has $87 million in local funds, $50 million in reserve funds, between $20-25 million from HUD, and $7 million from other federal agencies, for a total of $164-169 million to redevelop and rehab housing units, according to math from White during the budget hearing. In theory, DCHA could have the budget to fix all of its units, but in practice, the agency has to account for inflation, units with worse infrastructure problems than foreseen, and the fact the money also has to be used to maintain units. More units may also come offline and need rehab as tenants move out.
Ultimately, council members and the mayor share a consensus on the need to make cuts in the upcoming budget as the city faces new financial challenges with changes to federal funding and the recent decrease in the government workers’ tax base. However, as the budget hearings go on, it’s clear councilmembers often disagree with the mayor on which programs and services should be cut to balance the budget. Councilmembers will release proposed changes to the mayor’s budget in late June, and the council is expected to take its first vote on the budget on July 14.
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s June 18, 2025 edition.
