Mayor Muriel Bowser has spent the past year incessantly demanding more “accountability” for people breaking the law. Loose Lips can’t help but find it ironic, then, that Herroner has decided to start ignoring the law herself.
The D.C. Council was very clear in a budget vote this summer: Any tax revenue to come in above prior estimates should immediately go toward increasing food assistance for low-income families, funding legislation backed by At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson. Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee delivered the surprising good news this fall that the city would indeed have the extra $39.6 million it needs to bump up these Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. But Bowser told the Council last week that she’d be taking that money and using it to cover budget gaps elsewhere.
Admittedly, this sort of budget maneuvering happens all the time, particularly with this “excess revenue.” And Bowser’s deputies claim “they must find approximately $800 million across the government for pressures including union contracts, WMATA, and other expenses,” according to a Nov. 30 letter from Henderson to the full Council and forwarded to LL. But the SNAP law, as drafted by Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, does not allow any wiggle room, no matter the exigent circumstances, to guard against precisely this sort of trickery.
The upshot is that Bowser is simultaneously disregarding the laws she claims to hold so dear while denying more than 141,000 of the city’s most-in-need residents some extra money to put food on the table. It’s a move that would be maddening if it weren’t so grimly predictable.
“We need a mayor who cares more about people who have been left behind,” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who ran unsuccessfully to become such a mayor last year and could easily do so again in 2026. “And we need the mayor to be more responsible about the budget. Because we’re heading into really difficult times and it’s going to require more sensitivity to the people that are being left behind, otherwise it is going to kick us in the butt for years to come.”
Bowser’s decision feels like a particular thumb in the eye for Henderson, who has spent more than a year fighting to expand SNAP benefits in the wake of the pandemic, and Lewis George, one of the mayor’s least favorite lawmakers who trumpeted this budget win just ahead of launching her bid for reelection. And it marks yet another instance of Bowser stubbornly refusing to implement policies passed by the Council instead of working with lawmakers on alternatives. There’s a real question of whether she’s planning a similar move for funding set aside, as part of Lewis George’s budget language, to help workers excluded from pandemic relief programs. Those workers were set to see $20 million in aid out of any excess revenues once SNAP earned funding. White says Bowser is downplaying the possibility, for now, but it “seems very likely” she’ll try to redirect it after previously raiding that money for other priorities in this year’s budget.
LL has to wonder: How many times does this have to happen before the Council does something about it besides writing strongly worded letters?
“This is all happening in the larger context of the executive going up to the Hill and somehow pretending her office is weak, when in fact it’s incredibly strong,” Henderson tells LL. “When we put something in the budget, my colleagues and I not only need to be doing the necessary follow up to make sure that it happens but also building in conditions that make it nearly impossible not to do what we’ve asked.”
Wilson Building politics aside, Bowser’s move most acutely harms older, east-of-the-river residents, most of whom have already seen their SNAP checks slashed drastically as pandemic-era enhancements have dried up. LaMonika Jones, the director of the nonprofit D.C. Hunger Solutions, notes that many SNAP recipients are now down to just the federal minimum of $30 a month in benefits.
Compare that to the $281 per month many earned thanks to pandemic relief and you can see the gap the city is trying to fill. The enhanced SNAP benefits championed by the Council would only tack on an extra 10 percent to these checks for the next year, but Jones still sees it as a crucial lifeline. And she argues it’s also an economic boon for the rest of the city, considering SNAP recipients will spend this money at local grocers.
“Hunger is not going down in the District, it’s continuing to rise,” Jones says. “And the funding is there. This would be an entirely different conversation if funding wasn’t available.”
Henderson says she met directly with the CFO’s staff in October, who assured her that the money had already been moved into the budget for the Department of Human Services, which administers SNAP. Yet she says that the department has done basically nothing since then to prepare to hand out the increased benefits on Jan. 1, as the law requires. (This is a bit of a rerun from the previous controversy over late-night bus service, when the CFO supposedly assured Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen and Chair Phil Mendelson that excess revenue would fund that program only to renege amid resistance from Bowser a few weeks later.)
“It was kind of comical,” Henderson says of her efforts to extract details from DHS about the process. “I was thinking, ‘There must be something you don’t want to tell me’ because of how many times they canceled meetings with me about this.”
Spokespeople for Bowser and DHS didn’t respond to LL’s requests for comment. But the mayor told Henderson that she’d primarily need to use the money to address budget gaps within DHS (though the fact that she’s also citing needs created by Metro’s fiscal cliff, which will cost hundreds of millions to solve and has barely attracted any leadership from her administration, undermines some of these arguments).
For one, Bowser claims that DHS can’t afford the extra staff to administer the SNAP benefit increase, a classic argument from the administration when it doesn’t want to implement a Council-backed program. This came as a surprise to Henderson, considering she worked with the agency to avoid any such costs as she passed her original SNAP bill last year. DHS Director Laura Zeilinger even testified in support of it and didn’t raise any such concerns at the time. What’s more, White says Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage recently told the Council that DHS has been under a hiring freeze at the mayor’s direction, so it couldn’t hire more employees even if it needed them.
“DHS is stretched too thin and has been for years,” White says.
Bowser is also blaming increased costs of a bill aimed at reforming the department’s rapid rehousing program, which is aimed at getting people off the streets with temporary apartments. The Council passed legislation preventing the department from moving people out of these homes without a housing plan, amid concerns from advocates, and Bowser claims this is straining the DHS budget. But here again, Henderson feels the mayor is being less than honest, considering lawmakers went out of their way to specify that DHS wouldn’t have to do this if it would cause budget pressures.
Perhaps most amusingly, Bowser claims DHS needs the money to fund an annual cost-of-living increase for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients (a separate welfare program for low-income parents). However, Henderson notes that Bowser has never included money for this increase in her proposed budgets since this annual adjustment was created back in 2014, leaving it to DHS to move money around each year to fund it. This makes the expense hardly an unpredictable one, and certainly not the fault of anyone looking to increase SNAP benefits.
Indeed, Bowser also asserts that rising costs from the continued influx of migrants into the city is a more pressing need than these extra SNAP benefits, another instance of the mayor essentially pitting two groups of people in need of support against one other.
“These reasons are her reasons, but it’s still not an excuse for why we’re not implementing this as it’s been funded,” Jones says. “None of this is a surprise. We’ve been having conversations about this for the last two-and-a-half or three years.”
There’s little doubt that DHS has problems right now—consider that Henderson held a separate hearing earlier this week detailing how software issues and staff shortages have created huge delays in processing benefit applications of all kinds, including those for SNAP—but this whole episode suggests that Bowser isn’t even trying to solve these problems. Why focus on the hard stuff when there are Dubai climate conferences to attend or still more press conferences about crime to convene?
“We cannot let $40 million that was earmarked for food assistance be withheld when so many of our neighbors need relief,” Lewis George wrote in a statement. “Mayor Bowser urgently needs to get this aid out the door and to the District families that need it.”
Mendelson admitted in a recent appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Politics Hour that many feel the city government has simply “given up” on solving tough issues, and it’s hard not to agree when evaluating a situation such as this one. Even if you accept Bowser’s arguments about why she can’t spend this money after the Council promised it to needy families, all of her explanations seem to suggest better preparation could’ve averted this whole debacle.
Henderson and her colleagues are hopeful that they will convince Bowser to change her mind (and she’s suggested a separate hearing to put some pressure on the mayor). She says she’s spoken with the Council’s attorneys about other options to pursue to force the mayor’s hand, but she admits that “none of them are delightful” and “none of them are easy to deliver money to people when we said we’d deliver the money,” so it’d be much easier for Bowser to just reverse course on her own.
Yet it’s difficult for LL to be optimistic about Bowser coming around here, considering her stubbornness on other issues.
“It’s a really concerning pattern,” White says. “We can wring our hands and hold their feet to the fire, but that won’t necessarily result in a change. I’m just trying to be really clear with people about what’s happening and raise the alarm.”
Instead, Bowser will probably just keep decrying the rise in crime and violence in the city she leads, while never stopping for a moment to consider that her own actions have exacerbated the economic conditions making people desperate enough to break the law.