DC has over $600 million that sits unused in its Unclaimed Property Account. DC could use the money for schools, child care workers, fire trucks, trees, or anything else, but it just sits. For the last several years, I’ve filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests with the CFO.
Each year, the CFO’s office and I go through the same minuet. I file a FOIA request to find out how much is in the fund. His office denies the request. I appeal. The Mayor’s FOIA Office asks the CFO to reconsider. The CFO relents and releases the records. But don’t take my word for it. In February 2025, WJLA also found the fund. Therein lies a tale.
The District, like all states, collects abandoned bank accounts, insurance policies, stocks, and even gift card balances. It puts them in a fund, less what’s returned to owners. Maybe you’ve seen DC’s website about abandoned property. What’s kept far exceeds what’s returned. At last count, the fund had about $660 million and counting. Maryland and Virginia have similar funds, but they use theirs. DC could move it over to its General Fund, but it hasn’t. It just sits.
And what of WJLA? It found the fund, but spent most of its time on how jurisdictions make it hard to recover your money. Oh well.
After the DC Budget is approved, the Mayor may ask the Council to move around an agency’s funds or funds between agencies from one program to another due to something that wasn’t expected. These rearrangements are called reprogrammings, and the Council has to okay them if they’re more than $500,000.
DC Code § 47–363 Council Approval of reprogrammings says,
(a) The Mayor shall submit to the Council for approval a reprogramming request that individually or on a cumulative basis would result in a change to the original appropriated authority, along with certification by the Chief Financial Officer of the availability of funds for the reprogramming. The request shall include an analysis of its effect on the budget and on the purposes for which the funds were originally appropriated. [Emphasis Added]
So, you’d think if an agency reprogrammed $250,000 from one place to another and then wants to add $250,000 more to the same place, the Council would have to approve it, right? Or, if an agency wants to move $5 million of a grant from one place to another, the Council has to okay it, right? Nope and Nope. The mayor sends reprogrammings to the Council only if they are $500,000 or more and are appropriated by Congress.
As Amber Ruffin might say, What? What!? Apparently, neither the Mayor’s nor the Council’s budget offices have ever bothered to read the law or chose to ignore it.
The question about grants is a bit fuzzier. In 2018, DC’s Inspector General issued a report titled OIG Audit of District of Columbia Agencies' Fund Reprogramming Practices.pdf, which said,
The Reprogramming Approval Policy was Inconsistent for Grants
Although the proper authority approved the majority of the reprogramming requests we reviewed, we found that District agencies did not consistently request approval to reprogram grants. The District received grant money from the federal government and private donors during the review period. However, to avoid potential grant lapsing problems, it is important for the District to track and report to the D.C. Council reprogramming involving federal grants in a similar manner as reprogramming of local funds. Of the 45 reprogramming requests reviewed, we found 5 reprogrammed grants that were not properly approved. Three of the five grants were over $500,000, which required both OBP and D.C. Council approval. The remaining grants were under $500,000 and required only OBP approval. [Emphasis Added](Report p. 8)
Specifically, the IG recommended,
5. Establish a grant fund reprogramming policy to clarify requirements for reprogramming grants.
The City Administrator responded,
That OCFO and the agency staff ensure these funds are used according to the federal grant restrictions and, therefore, a policy is unnecessary. We note OCA’s position; however, it is important for the District to establish policy to track and report reprogramming of funds involving federal grants to ensure all grants are used efficiently. We request that OCA reconsider its position and provide an updated response within 30 days of receipt of this final report.
Since 2018, neither the IG nor the DC Auditor has raised the issue. The CFO reports quarterly to the Council about what he calls Local Funds reprogrammings, including those below $500,000 approved by the Mayor’s Budget Office. This Fiscal Year, for example, the School System reprogrammed $351,934 on November 4, 2025. On December 16, 2025, it reprogrammed another $200,000. Both moved out of the Schoolwide Services Division. In January 2026, the System moved another $247,731. In all, the System moved $799,665 without the Council’s approval. Other examples are easy to find. The Council may deem many reprogrammings small potatoes. After looking at what’s going on, it may want to revise its policies, but first, it has to look.
DCMR looks like a typical law search system, but it’s not. Instead of an organized code, DCMR is a collection of MS Word .doc files. Sometimes it has history notes and cites to DC laws, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Let’s say you want to know if the city’s regs allow you to post your yard sale signs on telephone poles. You figured out you need to look up sign regs on the District website, DC.gov. After duffing around, you find you’ll need to use the Office of Secretary’s reg portal, the DCMR, or, as the city puts it,
[T]he official compilation of the permanent rules, statements, and legal documents circulated by DC government executive agencies and departments, the Council of the District of Columbia, and independent entities. The DCMR contains 31 titles and all are available at DC Register.
So, click DC Register, and you get this screen,
You type “outdoor signs” into the Full Text Search Box, and voilà, you get this list of regs that contain the word sign, your quote marks notwithstanding.
You could then try clicking the rows to view the text, but that drill-down doesn’t work. There is no drill-down. To see something, click View Text, and the system will send an MS Word .doc file to your download folder, like this,
2506 SIGNS
2506.1 Any outdoor sign or other form of exterior advertising erected in any district shall comply with the sign regulations in the D.C. Construction Code, 12 DCMR § 3107A, that govern the erection, hanging, placing, painting, display, and maintenance of outdoor display signs and other forms of exterior advertising within the District of Columbia.
SOURCE: § 7506.1 of the Zoning Regulations, effective May 12, 1958 (renumbered 7605.1 in the April 1981 edition of the Zoning Regulations); as amended by Final Rulemaking published at 47 DCR 9741-43 (December 8, 2000), incorporating by reference the text of Proposed Rulemaking published at 47 DCR 8335, 8527 (October 20, 2000); 57 DCR 000126 (2010).
If you want to see what comes before or after a section, you’re out of luck. The DC Regs don't work that way.
If you expect links to referenced areas, nope, none there. You could soldier on down the DCMR rabbit hole, or just try a Google Site Search for the regs.
Another way to figure out the DCMRR is Josh Jacobson's website, DC Municipal Regulations, which puts an improved front end on the regs. What's really needed, though, is a complete redo putting the regs in a real online code system.
DC’s regs and rules deserve better than the current mess, so do those who want to know what they say.
The D.C. income tax system allows couples filing a joint federal return to file as individuals. The D.C. system is byzantine, complicated, confusing, and unfair to single people. Here is why. Take a couple with a taxable income of $260,000. When the couple files their D.C. income tax, they can file as individuals. If one made $90,000 and the other made $170,000, they would pay $15,400. A single person making $260,000 pays $18,900. The single person pays $3,500 more. That’s quite a tax on being single.
The difference does not end there. D.C. allows a couple to allocate deductions any way they want. That means the lower earner can assign all their tax deductions to the higher earner. This loophole lowers their tax even more. DC and Delaware are the only states that allow this move.
Maryland and Virginia don’t have either problem. If you file a joint return with the Feds, you have to file a joint return with them. If D.C. did the same, it would eliminate the lower income tax trick and the shift the deduction trick. It would also mean a higher taxable income base. D.C. could raise an equal amount of revenue with a lower tax rate. Doing so would simplify tax administration and be far fairer to single people.
Here’s the official DC Government organization chart in all its splendor:
The chart is from page 14 of the FY 2027 budget request. It comes complete with asterisks, dotted lines, and some such. It’s a top down view of the government. A true picture that included all the subordinate agencies would require a much larger space. You rarely deal with a department. Day to day dealings are with subordinate agencies, wherein lies the tale.
Dealing with the DC Government's notoriously complex way of doing business requires understanding what’s required, who requires it, and how to give it to them. You know the drill. Suppose you want to do something simple, like baking and selling cookies from your home. You peruse the city regulations and luckily find that what you want is called a Microenterprise Home Kitchen. Here’s what you’ll need,
- Corporate Registration - Register Your Business and Trade Name with the Corporations Division (If you are applying as a sole proprietor with no trade name, a corporate registration is not required)
- Tax Registration & Clean Hands - Register your business with the Office of Tax & Revenue by completing form FR-500. Request a Certificate of Clean Hands. The certificate must be dated within 30 days of submission of your license application.
- Follow the guidelines as required from each respective District government agency. Visit here for more information.
- To submit an application please visit the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Vending License Application.
If you have questions, you can contact the Vending Team at vending@dc.gov.
And that’s just to bake and sell cookies, but it illustrates that to deal with the city, you have to spend your time gathering permission from one city agency just to give it to another. Why do you have to give the same information to one agency after another? The answer is in the city’s oddball history of over a hundred years of nongovernment rule by Congress and the old Board of Commissioners.
When Congress abolished the Territorial Government in 1873, it put in place a whacko system. DC was run by a succession of three commissioners, one of whom was from the Corps of Engineers. The other two were political appointees who probably had no idea how to run a government that was at once a city, a state, and everything in between, but had almost none of their abilities to act. They, in turn, had to shove all that into a federal agency budget that required an act of Congress every year.
It didn’t take long for commissioners to realize their job was to make Congress and its DC committees happy, not DC residents. And those in Congress were often racists who viewed the city’s agencies as a place for their patronage appointments.
The result was not a city government, but a patchwork of departments and agencies operating on their own. No one had an interest in making agencies cooperate. More importantly, no one ever looked across the board at how the government functioned. It’s no wonder that each city department or agency gets to plan its own facilities without any regard to what others are doing, much less what the public wants or needs.
At the beginning of the Home Rule government, Walter Washington tried to deal with the Balkanized DC government. Following a national trend for supersized agencies, he merged the Health Department with the Welfare Department, creating the Department of Human Services, similar to the Federal DHHS. It didn’t work. While combining similar Federal policy agencies made some sense, it didn’t work with service delivery agencies. After a few years, the Mayor and Council broke out the Health Department. Later, they broke out children’s services, disability services, behavioral health, health care finance, and aging and community services, each in their own department.
More recently, the Council, frustrated with housing inspection failures, split Consumer and Regulatory Affairs into the Department of Buildings and the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection.
Various Mayors and the Council have tried creating a more effective structure, but those efforts have almost always involved trying to mix and match agencies without examining their functions. Thus, DC has seen a succession of approaches of box combinations. DC has created and abolished General Services. Environmental Services thrived for a while, but was folded into Public Works.
One notable attempt to combine similar functions was personnel operations. Over the years, several different agencies set up their own personnel function, duplicating functions. As a recent DC Auditor report found, the centralization fell apart.
“While recognizing that there is no “right” answer to the question of how much authority DCHR should have over agency human resources activities, ODCA finds that the D.C. government has been slowly but steadily shifting toward a decentralized system and that a more balanced approach is needed to promote efficiency and accountability, as explained below.
“ODCA calculated that DCHR exercises personnel authority (the authority “to administer all or part of a personnel management program”) for only 44% of the D.C. government’s employees, measured in full-time equivalents (FTEs) in FY 2025 and encompassing the legislative and executive branches and independent financial staff. As shown in Figure 5, ODCA also found wide variation in the scope of DCHR’s personnel authority by agency cluster, ranging from 5% of FTEs in agencies in the “Enterprise Fund” group in the D.C. government budget to a high of 95% of FTEs in agencies in the “Operations and Infrastructure” group.” [Emphasis Added] D.C. Personnel Operations Need Greater Coordination, Cohesion. Office of the DC Auditor Report, January 30, 2026. Page 9.
These attempts at rationalization usually occur after something dreadful happens rather than as part of a concerted effort to examine agency functions. The Council has created and abolished a Governmental Operations Committee and splits its oversight of agency operations among its ten various committees.
The District’s fragmentation is not easily overcome/ The Lab Project, recently, started a project to help businesses renew their licenses. Here’s its intro:
Why is this issue important in DC?
Keeping businesses running smoothly is a top priority for the District.1 Local businesses are a vital part of the District’s economy. They provide important services to residents, offer employment, and generate tax revenue that supports government operations. Every business in the District must have a valid business license to operate. To apply for or renew a permit, grant or contract, or, most commonly, a business license from the District, businesses need a Certificate of Clean Hands. This Certificate proves the business has filed all required tax returns and does not owe more than $1,000 in debt to the District.2 The process of requesting a Certificate of Clean Hands is not complicated or long. It takes only a few minutes on the DC Office of Tax and Revenue’s MyTax DC portal. Unfortunately, some businesses request a Certificate of Clean Hands and learn they are not compliant close to their license application renewal deadline. This leaves little time to resolve compliance issues. This can force the business to close while they work to get into compliance. Helping businesses get into compliance early and avoid disruption is a win for businesses, residents, and District government. [Emphasis added]
The Lab’s approach wasn’t to have the OTR team work with Licensing and Consumer Protection to alert a business that it owes DC X dollars in payments and to renew its license. Instead, The Lab
“is testing if proactive messaging improves timely compliance with the Clean Hands mandate among businesses. We have designed a simple letter alerting businesses to the ways in which they are noncompliant and providing clear steps to resolve the issues.”
While this approach is an improvement, it fails to address why a business needs to file an OTR form and print it out, scan it in, and upload it to LCP to prove that it’s kosher with DC. The business still has to go back to LCP to renew its license.
What’s a new Mayor to do? Improving DC Government’s responsiveness without reforming its underlying infrastructure is a hard, if not impossible, task. Every mayor and council have tried by mixing and matching agencies without really improving things. Only Tony Williams, who mandated new front end offices and services by public facing agencies made much of a lasting dent.
Here’s what a new administration could try. Explain to the public that remaking the government to be more responsive is going to take more than firing some folks or yet again reshuffling current agencies. It took over a hundred years for the current system to grow, so preparing a government worthy of a new state will take time, but we will get there.
The first step would be to put a new division for planning city facilities in the Office of Planning. OP plans for everything but what the government builds. Departments from Libraries to Schools to MPD to Health plan what they’re going to build, often hiring different consultants to perform the same studies over and over again. Requiring agencies to look beyond their own needs alone would be a new day.
The next step would be harder. The mayor should ask the Council for the power to reorganize by plan rather than by acts. This would let the Mayor submit a reorganization plan to the Council, and if the Council didn’t disapprove the plan within so many days, it would take effect. The Council could similarly send the Mayor its own plan that the Mayor could veto or let take effect. These plans could expedite change and eliminate sending individual acts to Congress for review.
To help the Mayor and Council to work on needed data and proposals, they would set up a commission to review how agencies respond to the public. For example, it would examine how one agency asks the public to go to another and produce something for the first agency’s use. It would give the Mayor and Council a plan to eliminate the public as a go-between for agencies or merge the agencies’ functions.
Finding things on the DC.gov website is not for the fainthearted. The site is a warren of dead ends, blind alleys, and old stuff. Over time, I’ve found some ways to dig into the site and find a few answers. Here are some that I hope can help your search:
Google Site Search. If you use DC.gov's search engine, you may find what you want. However, I’ve found that using Google Site Search is more direct. GSS lets you use Google on a specific site.
Here’s an example of finding the latest version of the DC Income Tax Filing Form D-40.
Type D-40 into the DC.gov homepage search box; you’ll get this:
Sorting by date is not much better. A GSS makes it easier:
In Google, type: D-40 site:DC.gov, you’ll get this:
With Google’s engine, you can, for example, click Tools and limit your search to one year or use Advanced Search. Want to find a phrase or name? Put it in quotes.
One thing you can do with GSS is see everything that’s on a website. For example, here’s all that’s on the Council’s site. If you wanted to know everything that’s been put up on DC.gov in the last 24 hours, type site:Dc.gov and use Google’s tools to look at the past 24 hours.
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Here are some more specific terms and links from the site:
Beta DC.gov. DC.gov has an incredible array of resources covering hundreds of governmental subjects, programs, and rules. However, it’s not so much a guide to using city resources as an umbrella hiding fiefdoms, blind alleys, third-party apps, and forgotten forms.
The Bowser administration has recognized the many shortcomings of the site and is testing a new version, beta.DC.gov. I’ve tried it a couple of times with mixed results. I’m afraid it’s not a reworking of DC.gov so much as just a new front end on the old mess. That’s a shame, but any improvement is welcome. I’ll say this for the test site: when you reach a dead end, it asks for your comment. That’s certainly more than you get now.
Budget Tutorial. Trying to figure out the DC Budget? The Council's Budget Office has a tutorial for you.
Contracts. The Office of Contracting and Procurement has a portal where you can search for contracts. You don’t have to fill in all the fields. For example, to find those in FY26, click Fiscal Year and click it. You’ll get a whole bunch. You can download what you find. You’ll also find a lot of omissions and typos. Oh, well.
Controller Source Groups AKA Budget Categories. You don’t really need a ouija board to figure out when a DC agency budget refers to its Controller Source Groups, but these may help:
Crime Stats. Want to know the latest on nefarious activities? Use Crime Cards. It’s MPD’s oddly named crime statistics portal with practically up-to-the-minute data on what’s happened where. Here's a sample,
DC Agencies. Here’s a list of, I hope, all DC agencies. This list is part of the Open Data DC project. If it’s a bit much, you can download it in CSV form.
DC Code. The Council’s website has a link to the DC Code, which is well done. It’s pretty easy to find a topic, and the codifier has done a fine job of giving you background information. Its search engine, however, has a notable bug. Putting a phrase in quotes doesn’t work as you’d expect. Instead of showing the quote, it shows you everywhere the words in the phrase appear. So, if you search for “police chief,” you get everything that has the phrase plus this,
The workaround for this is a Google Site Search like this: "police chief" site:code.dccouncil.gov.
Department Heads. Having a hard time with a department? Call the boss here. Click a header like Last Name to get an A-Z list. You can download this list, too. You can send a question to the agency director on this list, but I don’t know if you’ll get an answer.
Grants. Despite Elon Musk’s great efforts, the Federal Government still makes grants to state and local governments. Want to know just what DC gets and from whom? So does the City Administrator, Kevin Donahue. Last November, his FY2026 Performance Plan had this project,
Unfortunately, the April 2026 FY2027 Performance Plan is mum on the project. In fact, it’s mum on any and all projects. Previous Plans had a section on projects, but this year they’ve disappeared.
Oh, well, if you’ve got a yen to know more about grants, you might be interested in the CA’s Citywide Grants Manual and Sourcebook.
The Lab. Buried in a Deputy Mayor’s office, The Lab does interesting studies on a host of topics. Worth a look.
Laws. The Council has a link to the DC Code. The Code is nicely done.
Laws That Ain’t. The Council’s job is to pass legislation to improve DC’s lot. Sometimes its ambitions get ahead of its wherewithal. That happens when it passes laws, but fails to fund them. It does that a lot. Keeping track of what’s a law and what pretends to be a law takes effort. Each quarter, the Council’s Budget Office puts out a report on what’s not and why.
People. The District used to publish an alphabetical list of its employees and their salaries. Alas, that stopped about five years ago.
Performance Plans. Mayoral agencies must show how they are functioning for the public. Each year, they have to give detailed reports on their benchmarks and their plans for the next year. Each agency’s budget used to show these plans, but they were dropped a few years ago. If you’re curious, you can find the reports and plans on the City Administrator’s website. No fair noting how they change or don’t change year to year.