Niciah Mujahid: DC’s safety net is burning. The council can still save it.

Black, white or brown, across all eight wards, we all want a District that works for and keeps everyone safe, not just the privileged few. Back in March, Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a fiscal year 2025 budget proposal to the DC Council that called for “shared sacrifice” while slashing essential programs without asking anything much of our most well-off residents. To justify this indefensible budget, she tried to divide and scare us into budget cuts that we simply cannot afford and that will leave us less safe. She cut close to a billion dollars, eliminating entire programs from our social services and torching the safety net. Meanwhile, she invested hundreds of millions of dollars in both “downtown recovery” and “public safety” while failing to understand that thriving communities are the root of true safety and economic resilience for DC, and must be where our budget makes its investments. 

After a month of public hearings and subsequent deliberations, the DC Council has responded to community pressure and done some remarkable work to restore funding for essential investments in community such as Access to Justice for legal services (including eviction prevention), the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, domestic violence services, the DC Earned Income Tax Credit, and more — all while slightly raising taxes on multi-million-dollar homes to help pay for these programs and services.

But the math still ain’t mathing, as the phrase goes. The safety net continues to burn, with the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), housing vouchers to end homelessness, and nutrition assistance each horribly, shockingly underfunded. Thousands of housing-insecure families lack access to ERAP to prevent eviction, even as landlords have doubled the number of eviction filings compared to last year and rents have risen more than incomes. There are 3,200 families facing immediate homelessness with the Department of Human Services evicting them from the rapid rehousing program — 2,200 this summer, and another 1,000 starting in the fall. And unhoused individuals living on the street routinely face encampment clearance with no corresponding investment in housing and services to promote their health and well-being. DC’s seniors, both housed and unhoused, face the highest rate of older adult hunger in the country, yet their food assistance benefits are paltry, especially in the face of high, even rising, costs for food and housing. 

The human costs of the budget as currently proposed are staggering, but the council still has time to act to prevent the harms that would be inflicted from the mayor’s budget cuts. If legislators choose not to act, underfunded schools will be overloaded with families in desperate need and children unable to focus and learn due to trauma, sleep deprivation and hunger. Family life for thousands of residents will be disrupted as they face eviction. The physical and mental health needs of the newly unhoused will overwhelm DC’s health care system, and the overdose fatality rate will likely rise.

It’s also important for councilmembers and the mayor to understand that the choice to divest from housing security for residents undermines all other investments — in downtown recovery, in public safety, in economic growth. Downtown centers will become gathering sites for newly unhoused families and individuals in search of resources to care for themselves. Many of the low-paid workers who keep downtown humming — cleaners, coffee shop and restaurant staff, hotel workers, and delivery drivers — will be unable to hold down their shifts as they struggle with the complications that homelessness brings.

Yet this dire scenario truly amounts to a manufactured crisis. It is a policy choice not to put progressive revenue raisers at the center of this budget. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson raised revenue through a smart residential property tax increase on the highest-value homes, but he structured it to raise $5.7 million, only 1/10th the amount that the more robust, but similar, proposal in our “Safety Is Investing in Community” fiscal year 2025 budget platform would raise. The mayor has threatened to veto the budget if the council adds new revenue raisers, particularly on her high-income, high-wealth friends. As thousands of families face eviction, we should all be asking, “Where is the shared sacrifice that the mayor called for?” Without greater action by the council, it looks like our most vulnerable residents will be the ones sacrificed.

The chairman and several other councilmembers have stated their concern that this still-lopsided budget fails to do what is needed on housing insecurity and homelessness. But hand-wringing cannot protect DC’s most vulnerable or its $21 billion investments: Only rescuing the burning safety net can do that. Mendelson lamented the price tag for undoing the rapid rehousing debacle, but cost is not the real barrier. Policymakers have invested many hundreds of millions in downtown and also in a carceral approach to crime. Where is that same political commitment to a more equitable DC?

The council must vote to raise additional revenue at the upcoming second vote on the budget, scheduled for Wednesday. Our wealthiest residents must be part of the “shared sacrifice” the mayor referred to in her abysmal budget. By meeting the vital needs of communities, and by asking our wealthiest residents to pay their fair share, we will make our communities safer and stronger.

Safety can be achieved only through thriving communities with bright futures.

Niciah Mujahid is executive director of the Fair Budget Coalition.

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