001District leaders are heading into a high stakes budget hearing in less than an hour with some controversial cuts on the table. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed budget includes cuts to child care programs, shifts in public safety funding, and a growing police budget all as the city works to close a billion dollar budget gap. So, what does this mean for taxpayers and where should there be more accountability? Joining us now to try to sort it all out is Joe Bishop Henchman with the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure to be with you. Let's start with this big question here looking at the budget. So, are these changes about improving efficiency or just sort of shifting around taxpayer dollars in your estimation? They're long needed. The district's been overspending and
002spending beyond the economy for quite some quite a long time. Obviously, I'm here in Washington D.C. too and I remember it wasn't that long ago, just 10 years ago that the district's budget was 11 billion dollars a year. This year it's 22 billion. It's doubled in the last 10 years. That's much faster than inflation, double the rate of inflation, double the rate of wage growth, double the rate of the economy and do you feel like the city's gotten twice as good at what it does in those 10 years. So, rather than continuing to spend more than what the city's bringing in, I'm glad they're finally looking at program design and maybe rethinking some of these things cuz I think that the city does too much and does a lot of it badly. Where do you
003see the biggest risk here of the taxpayer money being wasted in this proposal? In the mayor's proposal, I think she's she's looking at some good areas but maybe not enough areas. So, I know there's a lot of interest in looking at the fleets. All all these different government agencies have vehicle fleets, certainly in overtime which costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year, even the size of the mayor's office, which I think is she's purporting to add proposing to add 14 more people to her office, which would make it larger than the governor of California's office. You know, maybe a good bragging right against Governor Newsom, but probably not the best use of taxpayer dollars. I'm going to ask the control room to put that graphic up again as I ask you about some of
004these items here. Items alike pay increases for for for future DC workers. Also something that hits a lot of people especially when they maybe don't know it. You have a sick parent, sick child. So scaling back universal paid leave and then also eliminating pay equity for child care workers. These are some of those maybe pulling on the heart string for sustainability for people who do so much in our community. What do you think about these cuts? I think isolated those are all worthy programs. I think with the pay equity fund especially it's been really difficult to create that on a sustainable way. We all want more child care. We all want it to be affordable to people and the approach that the city's been taking on that doesn't really seem to be sustainable. But with
005all of this we have to remember the economic reality that right now DC is in a recession. And it's hard to know that for sure because that's not how economic data is collected. Economic data is usually collected nationally. It's not looked at regionally or citywide, but I think a report just came out yesterday that the DC area lost 100,000 jobs as a result of Dodge and the contractor cuts from last year. That's hitting DC's budget very hard. That's hitting DC's revenue very hard. So you know, rather than doing all of these different programs in an unsustainable way, let's focus on how we can do what we want to do well. And the paid leave program is a good example of that cuz right now it's a lot of leave for a lot of different categories,
006not just new child or sick parent, but uh you know, relations beyond that and and other other program benefits beyond that. Maryland and DC Maryland Virginia folks can benefit from the program as it's designed right now. So, I think there's ways to look at it to make it more sustainable. >> ways to rein it in but still have it. I hear that. Um let's talk about the police budget. It's increasing. A big quality of life in the city though is safety. We're seeing a lot of this money come out of overtime. Are there any safeguards from your view there that should be put into place to just ensure that this money is not being mismanaged as we look to increase the budget? Every year the the mayor and the council have played this game where
007they don't budget for police overtime and they and they budget for a certain staffing level. They never hit the staffing level. Overtime goes to the roof and it they have to raid other budgets in order to make it balanced. I I do have to I want to want to give the mayor credit here. She's trying to at least put a realistic overtime number in there, but we really need to do something about the staffing levels. If if everybody or almost everybody agrees that we should have a higher police staffing level than we have, we need to figure out how to get there cuz right now we're dropping every year in the number of officers we have because attrition is outpacing recruitment. And until we figure out how to stop that from happening, these numbers are
008all going to be make-believe and overtime's going to be even higher than it is. Let me ask you this before we run out of time here, Joe. Uh charter school funding, let's talk about the fact that it's dropping compared to public schools. Is there a justification for the disparity here in funding and how would this benefit the taxpayer if so? Uh I mean half of DC students are in charter schools, so we should be continuing to sustain them. It's very popular program. A lot of these are some of our most innovative and and exciting programs. And so so I hope that the the council doesn't do further damage to charters. Uh, it's a great value for the taxpayer, uh, and and uh, parents really love them. Okay, Joe Bishop, henchman with the National Taxpayers Union
009Foundation. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Anytime.