No city has suffered more from the Republican Party’s anti-urban agenda in the first months of President Trump’s second term than Washington, D.C., especially in the transportation realm, advocates argue.
The District’s troubled relationship to the federal government reared its head last week when House Republicans passed a national budget that would force the city to cut $1.1 billion in municipal spending for fiscal year 2025 — 74 percent of which comes from D.C.’s own tax dollars.
That move — which opponents said would gut public services like schools and police, as well leave Metro transit with a budget hole of $200 million — still hasn’t been reversed despite a barrage of lobbying from D.C. residents and the Trump administration’s stated support for keeping the city’s budget intact. Over at the executive branch, though, Trump and company are still seeking to make an example of the city as a bastion of urban disorder, liberal overreach and mismanagement — including in the realm of transportation.
In early March, for instance, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy issued a series of letters to D.C. leaders, including one questioning “the application of murals or other forms of artwork within the traveled way” — a clear reference to the “Black Lives Matter” mural that Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration painted into the roadway of a car-free plaza near the White House in 2020. (Bowser had already preemptively ordered the removal of the mural amid mounting federal pressure prior to the letters.)
Duffy couched his letter to Bowser in terms of driver and pedestrian safety, claiming that “the application of murals or other forms of artwork within the traveled way can distract from the critical task of safe travel for everyone.” A 2022 Bloomberg Philanthropies study, though, found that art on roads and intersections actually cuts crashes with pedestrians by 50 percent.
That safety framing further defies credulity as U.S. DOT pushes policies that undercut traffic safety, like Duffy’s recent attempts to claw back countless federally funded bike lanes in the U.S. DOT pipeline.
Unlike states, though, the feds have veto power over D.C.’s budget — and D.C. doesn’t have a voting representative in Congress.
Because of that set-up, some D.C insiders worry Republicans may seek to impose policies that hinder transit, walking and biking on their city without the District’s consent, and that their community offers an easy victim for politicians who hate cities and the types of people who live in them — namely, people who are Black, liberal or queer.
“We are constantly keeping an eye on what a member of Congress from a state we didn’t elect might want to do or say about D.C.,” said Charles Allen, chair of the D.C. Council’s Council Committee on Transportation and the Environment. “They like to try to find culture wars and ways to attack, and the reason it happens to D.C. is because we’re not a state. I don’t have two senators. I don’t have a member of Congress. We make an easy target.”
‘We’re gonna have to take it back’
Trump made a particular point to trash the nation’s capital on the campaign trail as a proxy for his base’s disdain for cities writ large. Last month, he suggested the federal government should “take over the governance of D.C. and run it really, really properly,” ending a half-century of home-rule.
He reiterated that threat again last week.
“We’re cleaning up this great capital, and we’re not going to have crime and we’re not going to stand for crime, and we’re going to take the graffiti down and we’re already taken to tents down there,” Trump said, according to The Hill. “We’re working with the administration, and if the administration can’t do the job… we’re gonna have to take it back and run it through the federal government.”
While D.C.’s status as a crime-riddled urban dystopia may be a given from the Trump-Republican perspective, the data says otherwise. The city’s homicide rate spiked in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but dropped 32 percent last year. And as far as “proper governance” goes, the city has balanced its budget 29 years in a row.
“The reality is D.C. is an incredibly well-managed city,” Allen told Streetsblog. “Our finances are the envy of any city in America. We have our fire, police and teacher pensions fully funded. We are an accomplished, experienced, skillfully managed city.”
While Duffy’s March 6 letter to WMATA said the regional transit agency “must ensure crime and fare evasion are reduced” — a demand that echoed similar threats to withhold funding to New York’s MTA — it failed to cite any data to indicate that either metric was elevated.
WMATA’s fare evasion problems are hardly unique among U.S. transit systems — while the agency’s efforts to redesign its fare gates in 2021 led to an 82 percent drop in fare evasion.
“They may be writing and reflecting on what they saw several years ago, but they certainly don’t reflect today,” Allen said. “I hope it will be a good opportunity to catch him up on what’s happening [in] these transit spaces.”
“Low-hanging fruit”
The “Black Lives Matter” mural’s removal and the gash it left in the streetscape serves as a stark visual testament to D.C.’s undemocratic governance structure, which plays out in one form or another regardless of the party in power.
And some locals say Bowser’s decision to rip up that mural — and more generally, the conciliatory approach she’s taken with Trump since he returned to the White House in January — isn’t helping matters.
“[Mayor Bowser] was on the news saying that this mural had become a distraction,” said Megan Bailiff, whose company Equus Striping painted the mural. “But there is no form of appeasement for Trump, [who] wants [to eliminate] home rule not because he cares about the people of DC, [but] because he wants control of the National Guard and the police [to] squash any protest that might occur.”
Others argue that D.C. — a Black plurality jurisdiction that, were it a state, would be home to a higher percentage of LGBT residents than any other state in the U.S. — is simply too juicy a target for the Trump administration’s attacks on marginalized groups.
“It’s low-hanging fruit that can set precedent and send a message to the base of the Republican Party that, ‘Hey we’re doing all that stuff we said we would go to the people you hate,'” said historian George Derek Musgrove, co-author of the book Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. “Our vulnerability allows it to happen along any lines. We’re hosting World Pride in a couple months. I’m sure Republicans will go after us for that.”
Musgrove explains that D.C.’s subsidiary relationship to Congress stems from its founding in the Constitution. The city spent nearly a century under the feds’ direct rule beginning in the 1870s, when conservatives put D.C. under control of an unelected three-member board of commissioners with the explicit intention of denying Black suffrage.
While D.C. gained the ability to elect its own mayor and council under President Nixon in 1973, the modern Republican Party’s political bullying of the city gained steam in the late 1980s, Musgrove said, when President George H.W. Bush’s administration set up a fake crack deal near the White House to coincide with a presidential speech about the drug war. In 1992, Republicans and conservative Democrats teamed up to force the city to hold a referendum on whether to institute the death penalty, which D.C. voters rejected. Some Republicans in Congress today have gone so far as to propose repealing home rule entirely.
Despite that difficult relationship, Musgrove says D.C. residents have still managed to get their voices heard. In the 1950s and 1960s — before home rule was instated — D.C. defeated proposals to displace 30,000 people for highways, a victory that historians largely credit to the famous D.C. freeway revolts.
Today, national political leaders in Congress are still seeking to impose their political agenda on D.C.’s populace — and advocates will likely still play a pivotal role in resisting them. Duffy’s focus on crime and disorder in the District is reflective of his party’s attitude towards cities in general, according to Musgrove.
“A tremendous part of Trump’s political modus operandi is creating state crises and arguing that he’s the only person that can solve it and you have to give him more power to solve it,” he said. “If you go to Missouri, the state legislature is saying this about the cities there, and acting to take authority away from those cities in the name of crisis. In Mississippi, it’s happening in Jackson… They’re using the same playbook on D.C. — just on a more national level.”
