District Nullius III

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

May 31, 2025

D.C.'s Agency Problem

Unfortunately, District government exists, by gravitational influence, as a homunculus of Federal Government. In principle governance should be leaner as it levels down closer to localities, for political interests narrow as one zooms in to the grassroots of a single area. But District government doesn’t operate that way. By proximate interconnectivity and structural dependency, local District functionaries are obliged to mimic federal bureaucratic culture so as to match its stature, psychologically, and therefore achieve agency. Or so the notion runs. (The Mayor’s Office is officially referred to as the Executive Office of the Mayor (EOM), for example; most mayors and governors don’t find it necessary to include “executive” in their titles.) Mimetic isomorphism is the concept that accounts for the dynamics of such a relationship. It contributes to the District’s over-administration, often tending towards a bottlenecking of the policy processes of formation, implementation, and evaluation. From its Home Rule genesis in 1973, the District bureaucratic corps has expanded significantly as it tried to keep up with its suzerain.

According to a 1981 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, the total nonfarm workforce of the District of Columbia in 1970 employed in government (at any level) was 44.1 percent. For the next period measured, 1975, it was 46.8. As federal employment stabilized at that time, this change can be ascribed to the onset of Home Rule and the new local government workforce. The same report estimates local District government employing 53,000 persons, 8.7 percent of the nonfarm population, in 1980. As with the pursuit of any descriptive statistic, finding a definite tabulation of local government employees requires a lot of faffing busywork between sources, ultimately juicing them together by inference. As such, a Washington Post article from 1991:

The District government, which does not differentiate between part-time and full-time employees and whose population shrank 5 percent, to 606,900, saw its bureaucracy grow from 40,575 people to 48,704 during the 1980s.

At any rate, the bureaucratic inflation the Post refers to is due to the community activist policies implemented by its then mayor. No doubt impressive this, especially given the Reagan headwinds of the time. And even more impressive when set against the explosion in drugs, violence, and crime that worsened towards the closing of the decade. The 1990s saw the District attempting to recover from institutional licentiousness, only to be requisitioned by the Federal Government in critical matters of budget and security, between 1995 and 2001, supra. As District government was coming out of its recession, earning back its mandate, the country was recovering as well, from the dotcom bubble and the attacks of 9/11. Local government staff rolls began growing again.

Data between BLS via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) and District of Columbia Department of Human Resources (DCHR) don’t match precisely, but show a uniform trend upwards. FRED publishes two relevant “All Employees” metrics: “District of Columbia Government in the District of Columbia” (DCG), and, “Total State and Local Government in the District of Columbia” (TSLG). The latter figures are higher, more on that in a minute. The DCG number for 2011 is 31,600; 38,500 in 2021; and for 2024 (the latest available), 39,600. The DCHR employee number for Dec of 2011 is 33,671, and that for Dec of 2021 is 36,807. Its government body database (“Employee Salary Information”) puts the current number (as of April 1, 2025) at 38, 960. Other D.C. government sources are inconsistent as well. The Office of the Administrator lists 35,000 as the approximate number; TogetherDC has 37,000. To compound things further, as the Post article above hinted at, from 2014 on, any payment for services rendered, however small, is recorded as an entry in DCHR’s database, and so can be interpreted as an “employee”. From the 2014 figures, Machine calculated 12 percent of the records presented are for payments of $1,000 or less. Solutions for managing a clearer dataset are so straightforward, defaulting into a state of cynicism almost feels like a trap. So rather than quick-sanding oneself too deeply into these greasy data, two effective conclusions can be escaped with: District Government has grown over the last two decades, and, similar to the land management shortcomings discussed earlier in this essay, it’s always done a poor job of tracking itself.

As for FRED’s TSLG data, it’s generally 10 to 15 percent higher than the DCG aggregates. And this, Machine believes, represents the lower end of what the accurate count is in real life. But before getting into why the true count is perennially understated, first a quick scan of the two giant marshmallows of D.C. government: the enterprise of the Mayor’s Office and the departments associated with health, safety, and social services. To begin, the Executive Office of the Mayor (EOM), according to DCHR, has a white-collar employee list of 114. The counting method for this is dubious, as will be demonstrated presently. It’s still quite high for a polity of the District’s size, even at this prevaricating number. Per constituency capita it employs nearly five times as many people as its New York City counterpart. The City of Los Angeles doesn’t publish a figure for its Mayor’s Office employees, but it does for total employees, just over 50,000. If the EOM/District population ratio were extended to Los Angeles, that office would have about 650 employees. Quite improbable. The Executive Office of the President of the United States, for further context, employs only 1800 or so (including maintenance staff). Again, on a per constituency capita basis, this would be a pittance when compared the D.C. government cohort. The District’s EOM is where the overstuffing of staff is executed, en effet, setting the tone for the rest of the bureaucracy.

Local D.C. government maintains a human services industrial complex, as it were. Probably not a gasping secret, that. A grand welfare state machine, it’s a giant, lumbering juggernaut. And its existence is yet another contributor to the complex vibe of the place. A Cato report based from 2006 (though famously biased, it’s based on BLS figures) provides a breakdown of state and local government activity as a percentage of total employment at the state level in 2004. The District of Columbia came in second overall with 16.2 percent (Alaska was 16.6 %) employed by local government. Wyoming, Mississippi, Louisiana round out the rest of the top five. It does seem odd that an urbanized area supplemented with the highest possible concentration of federal government would require this level of local service. If one considers that a significant portion of the District’s portfolio is managed for them (e.g., USADC, NPS, NCPC), this percentage takes on a stronger concentration. The report also provides line items for these percentages. Some of which, in the case of D.C., are singular. Under the category of “Safety”, D.C. government leveraged 3.3 percent of the local labor pool. By a good measure more than any other state, and nearly twice the average (1.7. %) of all states. The percentage of “Services” employees was measured to be 4.6. Again, well surpassing number two, and over three times the states’ average (1.3%). The District also comes in second place with 1.6 percent, again behind Alaska (2.2 %), under the heading of “Other”. The “Safety” and “Services” sectors of District Government warrant scrutiny, as respective outcomes don’t match the putative efforts and resources these numbers indicate. (D.C.’s life expectancy is below the national average; its homicide rate per 100,000 is consistently the highest.)

So what does D.C. Government’s social safety and services industry look like? Again, the District isn’t responsible for prosecuting felonies committed in its jurisdiction: the U.S. government takes that on. The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services employs 480 people. Then there’s the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, which has a staff of 59. The OAG operates with 683. The Department of Corrections, 1,007. There’s the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council of 15, which requires a director, apparently. And of course, MPD with its total workforce of 3,190. That’s a total of 5,457 humans laboring on behalf of security. For a nominal jurisdiction of 700,000, this is a lot of manpower application. Metro PD has about 5 personnel for every thousand District residents. LAPD has 3 for every thousand. MPD has about the same as NYPD, but considering the panoply of federal law enforcement agencies in the District, this seems odd.

The count of employed positions operating in the name of social services is greater than the aforementioned security cohort. At 5,470 employees, D.C. should be as civilized as Switzerland or Singapore. It’s not, spoiler alert. Almost as many people work for the D.C. Department of Human Services (1,210) as D.C. Department of Public Works (1,344). The Department of Behavioral Health employs the highest paid public servants in the District (45 of them earning at least 300k), in a department of 1,150. The Department of Healthcare Finance employs 285, and the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority 124. Why these are separate entities, necessitating multiple high-paid directors, is confounding. The bureaucracy of the District of Columbia has experienced runaway cellularization that manifests itself in the proliferation of the over-paid director roles. Not the root cause of bad District governance, but a casually perceivable symptom, to be sure. Another such symptom is the phenomenon of the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE). These are quasi-government agencies that are effectively sub-contractors. They operate with the opaque accountability of a private business and the efficiency of bad government. DC Water is perhaps the most marquee example (How many water boil advisories have you heard about in the last couple of years?). DCHR doesn’t provide a salary list of such operations in their public body information, internet-facing database. One is obliged to fish around the internet for FOIA-induced documents (Freedom of Information Act). The State Board of Education is an independent agency as well? Many other public/private ghost agencies can be traced back to the Mayor’s Office.

As alluded to above, any kind of tally of total employees of the EOM is misleading, as Machine is confident different members of its own office wouldn’t be able to communicate consistent figures. A few more agencies work for the EOM, though they’re given independent categories on the DCHR database. The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has a staff of 77, for example. The Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (a grammatical sweet-tart) is another. With a staff of 16, it has a director, and a director of operations who both earn over $100k. Then there’s a slew of the single-issue Offices, at least twelve, all with their handsomely-salaried director positions. They are also given exclusive categories by the DCHR, but this time without any entries. Are they GSEs? If so, why so? So more FOIA work would be required to sort out who they are and how much public money they’re commanding. Researching District Government agency info is like playing wack-a-mole, every bit of task presumed cleared is replaced with a new oblique font of slippery data. The dashboard produced by the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Appointments (MOTA), itself a DCHR category without entries, lists the total mayoral appointees for the EOM at 285. Is this the actual number of people working for the EOM? Probably. The previously mentioned figure of 114 was treated as quite high: 285 is superfluous.

Initially, Machine set out to analyze the policy environment of local D.C. government, but in the course of this analysis it has been confronted with the realization that that would be futile. If the electrical transformer on the power pole in front of your property has rotted out, inspecting the wiring in your house is precipitous. The source of the District of Columbia’s government dysfunction is the scattershot of agencies it’s comprised of. There are too many independent government entities operating under the District government umbrella. A financially ponderous arrangement, as every agency requires a director, general counsel, chief of staff, chief administrative office, Bob Loblaw…all at inflated pay grades. Overall efficacy degrades as well; government communication suffers diminishing marginal returns with every added agency, department, office, commission, etc., the crowding out effect described in the introduction in District Nullius, and illustrated by the Crime Bill of 2022. (A still lower-hanging manifestation of this is the plethora of semi-unique entity logos that result in the muddling of a cohesive District government message: Open Data DC and Open DC, for example.) District government entered the doom loop of growing administration required to administer a growing administration, ad infinitum sometime in the early 1980s. The shield of ambiguity on which its status as a quasi-state government affords, buffets and protracts its continuance. Statehood, therefore, must be the cure for D.C.’s ills. For, if achieved properly, this process would force D.C. government into a state of accountability, straightening out its structure, particularly vis-à-vis the federal government, whilst cleaning up its civic problems.

The Decline and Fall Line

The District sits on a topographical zone known as a fall line, where a coastal plain and upland region meet. It also happens to be the geographical dividing point between north and south (as anyone who has spent four consecutive seasons in the DMV can attest; southern summers and northern winters). Compromise between two regional cultures is the historical raison d’être of Washington, D.C. A concession offered to the agrarian commodity suppliers of the south so as to allow for a federal economy based on deficit spending, steered by the commodity markets of the north. A linchpin binding two cultures to a state, the new capital was the very embodiment of federal interest. As the 19th century progressed, southern interest inevitably pulled back with ever more vigor, stressing its connection point with the north. Washington became a sentry tower and forward operating base in the territory of a recalcitrant partner, holding the line with its watchtower eye. The institutional posture and authority granted the local District government, from the beginning, was yet to distinguish itself from the more pressing federal agenda of keeping the union together. That linchpin stress is a vestigial dimension of the charged district atmosphere of the present day; two cultures dividing a nation with a common capital.

The capital district existed as an extension of the federal government, to keep the peace, therefore local government was always of secondary importance. The Civil War matured the District into a polity that found itself with autonomous needs. Though a brief attempt of satisfying these needs was made (1871 Organic Act), territorial expansion of the United States commanded a much more sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus to administer such growth. For the next hundred years the needs of the mandarin trumped those of the local, adding a Kafkaesque dimension to the antebellum vibe. When the borders of the United States finally settled in 1959 (Alaska and Hawai’i), internal development accelerated. Rumblings for more District self-autonomy began, culminating in the 1973 Home Rule Act. The development of local D.C. government since then has been complex, as hopefully this essay makes clear. It’s never developed properly in part because the federal government doesn’t have a mechanism through which this can happen. District government has been rutted in place from its inception, resulting in the overspun autodynamic mission it assumes today. As the United States is seemingly undergoing a frightful historical transition, it will do well to update its relationship to its capital region. Therefore both governments stand to benefit from D.C. statehood.

Modern District
In the context of an administrative division for a modern democratic republic, what is a district exactly? Territories, states, commonwealths, boroughs, counties, parishes, cities, independent cities, unincorporated areas, townships, wards, these all are pretty well understood. There are congressional/senatorial districts, of course, but those lack any real executive authority. As an entity triangulated somewhere between a state, territory and independent city, districts lack a clearly codified definition. The lateral category of federal enclave is an evolving concept that can provide a rough cast capable of containing the District of Columbia’s complex jurisdictional geometry. Jurisdictional theory can be used as a guiding heuristic for administrative divisions. To the civil, criminal, and proprietary realms of jurisdiction, one could add executive and legislative. Required is a comprehensive understanding of the current administrative shape of the District in order to design a channel through which it can evolve into a state. One thing is perfectly clear, the capital qua Federal District of the United States played an inestimable role in securing the state apparatus and therefore binding the antipodal nation during the initial century of its existence. As the republic may now be in the process of an epochal transition, an autonomous district may be needed to prevent the state form tearing the nation apart, as previewed on January 6, 2021. For if the fate of a country lies in the fate of its capital, modernizing the capital to match the complexion of the current nation state is paramount to all.

District Restructuring Policy Recommendations
The District of Columbia has never governed itself with complete autonomy, or in fact, demonstrated its ability to do so in its current form. If statehood is to be pursued, significant restructuring will be required, along with performance metrics that assess its competency in the most vital concerns of governance: finance and security. The first step towards straightening out the books will see District government launching a massive audit of all land holdings within its limits, the creation of a modern Domesday Book of Washington, D.C., an itemized list of properties, including who’s responsible for their maintenance, security and taxation. This should be the size of chapbook, commensurately simplified; a New Dominion, as it were. The source of the District’s fiscal ills lies, in part, with its bad cadastral design, whose rectification the federal government will have to initiate. They will need to subsume diplomatic areas of mixed ownership, beginning with the Diplomatic Overlay District created in 1977 by District of Columbia Zoning Commission, adding them to a district federal enclave portfolio that includes the two existing, and requisitely created diplomatic campuses. Then compel the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) to condense their “Diplomatic District” by collapsing its existing “Matter-of-Right” and “Diplomatic Zone” into an entity that is conceptually a bit cleaner. Inevitably, the Foreign Missions Act will have to be amended. The aim is to create a proper Graecostasis jurisdictional category, particular the capital region, net of unnecessary ambiguity. Appropriations and GSA-managed properties can consolidate into a slightly expanded L’Enfant Federal District. Reservations are not necessarily a fiscal problem. The above steps will naturally clarify the U.S.-owned contingent of District-managed property and clear the way for D.C. government to effectively prosecute this land audit.

With the issue of jurisdictional obfuscation worked out, the District will now have command of the necessary information to govern, and for present purposes, make itself right to govern. Operating in the shadow of a monolithic enterprise like the federal government of the United States and its supercilious oversight, the local garden of government has been left to over-fertilize itself into a condition of thatch overgrowth. An aeration elixir will allow in the nutrition of daylight and oxygen. As harked on in the previous section, the District has too many agencies doing too little, transducing local government into a state of custodian paradox: investing material interest in the persistence of the social problems the agencies are designed to ameliorate. In the case of District government, that begins at the Mayor’s Office.

The Mayor’s office needs downsizing and subsuming of its quasi-public agencies. Its Office of Community Affairs doesn’t require individual operations for every demographic subdivision, each with a high-salaried director. This work would be better served, in fact, with a leaner, more focused group of personnel. In the last decade of the United States, the noble and necessary push to effect social change has devolved into a disingenuous strain, morphing the phenomenon into a decay-inducing lucrative pop culture market (to be analyzed in a future issue). “Change” is being diluted of its meaning; similar to “literally” and “amazing”. Freeing D.C. government from this mission creep would do it well. Many other structural inefficiencies are present. An audit of EOM personnel and its satellite GSEs would be the requisite first step in addressing them.

Then the DC human health services complex needs sanitizing. A much more sensitive area of restructuring, to be sure, as it involves the habituation of received public services. So covering this area must be done tactfully. There is a structural decay in this domain, maintained by too many high-paid status positions. This adversely affects the security of the region, as salaried interest is inextricably linked to maintaining a high baseline of the problématique. For, with such formidable agency energy focused on issues of community security/development, one must ask: why is the level of violence and crime stabilized to such a horrible degree? With the atomization of agencies comes myxomatosis of meta jobs --again, of program analysts, project managers, directors, deputy directors, heads of staff, human resources, general counsels for all of the above--armor applied to inefficient operations so as to lock in insular support. Local bureaucrats intuit this operating state, which manifests itself with an outwardly churlish projection that adds to the dense welter of D.C. vibes this essay is tracking. There should be the appropriate ratio between administrators and the people actually doing work. That is, there should be X amount of office staff per teachers, electricians, building inspectors, police officers, fireman, engineers, technicians etc. Perhaps there’s an admin golden ratio to be found, a formula that is fair, understandable, reasonable, rational, legitimate, and most importantly, transparent. Too many people steering, not enough rowing: an unhealthy, and unnecessary perpetual tragedy.

Achieving Statehood
After clarifying jurisdictional coverage, shaking up the executive office, and then wringing up and out its social services industry, District government may then attempt to demonstrate its competency at statecraft. Juvenile crime is the one area of critical import where it holds a semblance of autonomy. Lowering the juvenile crime rate significantly, then, can serve as a worthy index. As the government representing the environs of national institutions, it ought to be held to a higher standard. The lack of capital pride among local functionaries is breathtaking (Metro employees are the most visible example). To prove its competence, District government should reduce its juvenile crime to a rate below the collective average of all states (that is, the average of all the states' averages). A polity without a hinterland should compensate with superior administration. Exhibiting sustained abrogation over youth crime is a good start. From there, a path to statehood can naturally open up, and D.C. could have the political capital to pursue tackling its adult crime problem independently.

With the tailwind of policy success, District government will find it much easier to advocate its case for statehood. Heretofore, the problem seems to be the inability to communicate a legal course for this. Democrats want to push through legislation and allow the courts to decide on its constitutionality; Republicans interpret the only possibility to be a constitutional amendment. Congress does have the authority to admit new states, as stated in Article IV, section 3 of the Constitution. The Supreme Court would only be required when and if there were territorial disputes with other states, see Vermont, West Virginia, and Michigan. In the present case the only territory dispute would be with the federal government for land holdings catalogued in the previous issue (L’Enfant’s Angles). The New Dominion audit proposed above would obviate such dispute. Procedural legal precedents can be located in the cases of the District of Kentucky (from Virginia) and the District of Maine (from Massachusetts).

Vibes as Institutional Exhaust
District nullius, the vacuum of negligence in the Home Rule era, has allowed the federal government to maintain seizure of the District’s critical affairs. An amalgam wendigo spirit has seeped through the resultant jurisdictional cleavages. Antebellum tautness being a significant stream of which. Big city slowness and suborned Yankeeism; northern capital, southern labor, and the vestigial moral embarrassment. The urban villages of Arlington County, across the Potomac, are more integrated into the District’s professional activity than its eastern area, across the Anacostia, for example. The Kafkaesque ping of unease contributes as well. Legions of federal wonks locust-buzzing though innumerable brutalist deathstars, pinching out the surrounding municipal frequency. The graecostasis cohort concentrated in the northwest and a growing number of bubble buildings throughout the District (e.g., the “Bland Canyon” of Capitol Riverfront). Their righteous insouciance. Unconscious, but palpable nevertheless the resentment between all these demes. Vibes are a function of institutions. Tuning up the institutional framework of the District will go a long way in exorcising its wendigo spirit. Such that next time it’s confronted with a national leviathan like that of January 6, 2021, it just might be better suited for the task.

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