DC councilmembers request to meet with Mayor, CFO amid 2026 budget delays
WASHINGTON () – Frustrations are growing among D.C. councilmembers as they continue to wait for the 2026 budget.
'I just think this is all ridiculous and pedestrian and in fact embarrassing,' Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker said.
The budget was due to the council by April 2.
Advocates express concern to lawmakers over proposed $1 billion cuts to DC budget
However, Mayor Muriel Bowser missed that deadline after Congress passed a spending bill that gutted D.C.'s current budget by a billion dollars. Her office has been working on a supplemental 2025 budget to address the gap while waiting to see if Congress will pass a funding fix to restore D.C.'s budget.
Meanwhile, the council set a second deadline of May 15 to receive the 2026 budget and the 2025 supplemental budget.
Chairman Phil Mendelson said that the deadline won't be reached.
'We're running out of time, in fact, I'd say we are out of time,' Mendelson said.
On Monday, Mendelson sent a letter to Bowser demanding that she turn over both budgets.
'It is disrespectful to the Council and the public … to continue delaying submission,' he wrote.
On Tuesday afternoon, he said he had not received a response to his letter from the Mayor's office. He said as of 9 a.m., the CFO had not received the 2026 budget in its entirety, only in piecemeal.
Once the CFO does receive the entire budget, it'll take the CFO 10 days to certify that the budget is balanced and get it to the council, according to Mendelson.
As the council waits in limbo, members are requesting a meeting with the Mayor and the CFO to discuss where things stand and how to move forward. That could potentially happen on Wednesday.
'I really think we just need to pull everyone into a room so that if there's a disagreement, we can figure it out and figure a path forward because every day that goes by, this hole is getting deeper,' Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen said.
Mendelson said if the council does not get the budget soon, he may consider legal action.
'As far as I'm concerned, all options are on the table,' he said. 'As you heard, members are clearly frustrated, the public is being disadvantaged, in fact, the operation of government is being jeopardized.'
Congress poised to force $1B cut to local DC budget, surprising many lawmakers
DC News Now reached out to Bowser, but she declined to respond.
At a press conference in April, Bowser maintained the budget was done but is being held up due to Congressional interference in the 2025 budget.
'We have no interest in hoarding the budget. We are done, we're talking about it, we want it to move. We have some things that need to happen,' Bowser said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Christina Coloroso, the Analyst Institute's executive director, told me its officials coach Democratic organizations to not expect huge positive results in presidential-campaign years. She acknowledged that groups can be reluctant to share data even within the Democratic community 'when the results don't look great,' but she said the institute allows its members to submit research anonymously to allay fears. 'It's true that we may not see every single test that exists across the ecosystem, but all the work that we do is to try to get to a critical mass of studies,' Coloroso said. The search for the decisive edge in political campaigns has always been a hunt for novelty. Any new tactic that works doesn't work that well for long. Everybody starts doing it. Voters get tired of—and sometimes quite annoyed at—the calls, the texts, the emails. 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Conventional turnout methods—door knocking and phone calls, for example—can still have a big impact in low-turnout races, such as primaries, special elections, and campaigns for local office. But with the parties now spending more than $1 billion on the presidential campaign every four years, they've seen diminishing returns on each individual mobilization tactic. Vote Forward emerged out of a letter-writing experiment conducted during the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, a deep-red state where the Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeated Roy Moore, a former judge who had been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by several women. The turnout rate for people who received handwritten messages was three points higher than for those who did not. 'That was the holy cow,' Radjy said. 'This is a tactic that can really, really move the needle.' The impact of the group's letter-writing program has decreased over time, Radjy told me. Vote Forward found that its letters had no effect on the initial group of 'surge voters,' people who had participated in at least one major election since 2016. But the organization was able to expand its program to additional groups, mainly newly registered voters. Among these groups, the campaign boosted turnout by 0.16 percentage points, enough for Radjy to consider that part of the effort a success, because it was similar to the average effect for all previous measured presidential-election turnout programs. Vote Forward estimates that it drove an additional 9,000 voters to the polls nationwide. As paltry as that number might seem, it's larger than the total margin of victory in the battle for control of the House during each of the past two elections. The letter-writing program is also relatively inexpensive, costing about $175,000. The group has concluded that although it will still use the tactic in small campaigns, it likely will not do so in the same way in 2028. Democrats can take some solace in the fact that the nation's rightward shift last year was much smaller in the states where they campaigned most aggressively. That suggests that the hundreds of millions of dollars they poured into advertising and voter-turnout efforts did make a difference. And even the best ground game cannot overcome a flawed candidate or message. But the party's defeat is accelerating a broader questioning of its organizing and ability to connect with the millions of voters who are up for grabs in presidential-election years. 'Democrats have much bigger problems on their hands than what they're doing on the doors at the end of the election,' said Billy Wimsatt, the founder of the progressive Movement Voter Project, a clearinghouse for donors to Democratic groups. He said the party needs to learn from the success of the well-funded MAGA movement, which he calls a 'vertically integrated meta church' that, 'feels like one big purpose-driven team,' even with all its faults. 'Their billionaires are savvier than our billionaires,' Wimsatt told me, 'and they're more interested in winning.' Wimsatt is one of many Democrats who believe that the party needs to invest in much deeper engagement with voters—outreach that must start long before an election. So does Radjy: 'We need to be talking to people earlier,' she said. 'We need to be talking to people in a more curious and reciprocal way.' But first comes honesty about what went wrong in 2024. Democrats will appreciate it. They might even demand it. 'Even candor that is not rosy,' Radjy told me, 'is more appealing than rosy bullshit.'
