Early childhood educators can probably kiss some badly needed raises goodbye, thanks to Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee and Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Herroner’s 2025 budget proposal, finally unveiled Wednesday after weeks of delays, realizes the worst fears of D.C. child care workers and their allies in the city’s progressive community. It completely wipes out a Pay Equity Fund created several years ago to deliver badly needed salary bumps to these workers, many of whom struggled mightily during the pandemic and have long seen their wages lag behind their colleagues in D.C. schools. The reduction amounts to the single largest cut made to a program across the city government, though Bowser ultimately had to make plenty of other reductions and changes to realize roughly $4 billion in savings and balance the budget over the next four years.
Word first circulated around the Wilson Building a few weeks ago that this fund might get a major haircut as Bowser wrestled with a difficult budget picture, exacerbated by the CFO’s demands that the city devote $250 million to replenish one of its reserve funds. But few observers expected to see the entire fund, stocked with roughly $70 million annually through 2028, raided to cover budget gaps elsewhere.
Other changes will surely draw attention from lawmakers as they review the mayor’s proposal—cuts to affordable housing funding and the complete elimination of the DC Circulator bus service come to mind—but the funding for child care workers will almost certainly attract the most intense pushback. After all, the Council has spent the better part of a decade arguing over how to raise wages for these workers, and specifically used a 2021 income tax increase to jumpstart these efforts. So far, the fund has delivered something like $80 million in raises to roughly 4,000 educators (via the facilities that employ them), and there’s still a long way left to go before they achieve anything approaching pay parity with the public and charter school sector.
“This would basically be like fumbling the ball in the end zone,” says Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager for Educare DC, which operates several child care programs throughout the city. “Teachers have already started structuring their lives around this. They’ve started buying homes with what they thought was this commitment from the city government to maintain this money. … We all know that the District would never consider an across-the-board cut to D.C. public school teacher salaries like this.”
In a briefing with reporters ahead of the budget’s release, Bowser’s top deputies characterized this cut as a last resort, blaming the CFO’s intransigence on the reserve issue for forcing their hand. One Bowser official, who requested anonymity to discuss the budget before the mayor presented it to the Council, said the fund was “the only remaining program of that size” that had not yet been targeted for cuts. When Lee made his “eleventh hour” demand that the city immediately fund its reserves, this Bowser deputy said they had no choice but to slash the program and give a balanced budget to lawmakers.
Loose Lips has some reason to doubt these assertions, of course. Council Chair Phil Mendelson has argued that Bowser’s team has had plenty of time to adapt to the CFO’s position, even if he disagrees with it. Similarly, advocates backing the program say they have heard rumors for months now that the administration was considering rolling back the fund somehow.
“I just don’t believe she ever intended to fully fund it,” says Tazra Mitchell, chief policy and strategy officer for the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, noting that Bowser also made comments about “right-sizing” the program in last year’s budget cycle. “It already didn’t have enough money.”
Indeed, Bowser’s deputies told reporters that they initially planned on trimming the equity fund “very modestly” before receiving Lee’s news, even though demands on the program have only been increasing. Many educators sounded the alarm last year, for instance, that the fund didn’t have enough money to offer pay raises commensurate with experience, even as the city puts more demands on these workers to earn additional credentials.
“As they get that next credential, the city has to pay them even more, through pay equity,” says Barragan-Smith. “Any significant cut to this would be catastrophic for the program, because there wouldn’t be enough money to pay teachers these salaries … and it will demonstrate to them that there is no certainty to this.”
To address this uncertainty, Mitchell hopes that the city at least considers moving money around to keep the program alive in the short term, even if it plans cuts in the future. Bowser officials say they proposed funding the raises for next year only, then partially repaying the city’s reserve accounts, but Lee rejected that arrangement. A spokesperson for the CFO did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that assertion, but this sort of hard-line attitude would be in line with what LL has been hearing about the bean counter’s negotiating tactics over the past few weeks.
As Bowser’s team sees it, they fundamentally can’t make cuts to huge swaths of D.C.’s budget, so something has to give. Pay rates for unionized employees—like cops or public school teachers—are locked in by contracts negotiated years in advance. Things like Medicaid reimbursements or loan repayments are similarly set in stone. So some programs, like the Pay Equity Fund, have to take it on the chin. (Other agencies are considered untouchable, of course; the Metropolitan Police Department will see a $77 million funding increase under Bowser’s proposal.)
Things are so bad that the mayor even agreed to a few tax increases, generally anathema to her administration. She wants to raise $250 million by reversing a payroll tax cut for businesses, then bump up the city’s sales tax starting in 2026 to generate an extra $120 million or so to address Metro’s yawning budget gap.
It’s going to take a much more aggressive solution to reverse the pay equity cuts. Probably the simplest path forward would be the Council forcing some sort of acquiescence from the CFO, and Bowser’s team said they would be open to continued negotiations on that front. They already secured at least a partial concession from Lee, getting him to allow the city to refill the reserve fund over the next three fiscal years (initially, he suggested it would all need to be repaid in 2025). Mendelson has floated this sort of idea as a compromise before, so there could be more room for negotiation.
If Lee stays steadfast, things get a lot harder on the Council. There’s undoubtedly support among lawmakers to restore its funding, as LL counts at least five councilmembers who have already expressed public support for the program since rumors grew louder about its shaky future. Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker went so far as to call its inclusion in the budget “non-negotiable” last month. But there just aren’t many ways to move money around without more politically unpalatable maneuvers, like more tax increases.
“It feels as though we are proposing to balance this budget on the backs of Black and brown women,” At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson said Wednesday as Bowser presented her budget, briefly choking up. “This is at odds with our overall goals and what we claim to care about.”
Progressive groups will surely make that argument loudly over the coming months—consider that a recent study by the city’s Tax Revision Commission found that there was essentially no tax flight out of the city after lawmakers raised rates on high-income earners three years ago. But that same commission also melted down without providing concrete recommendations about other tax increases that lawmakers could contemplate to cope with these cuts. Will the Pay Equity Fund’s erasure inspire them to act anyway?