WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans have long panned local policies in Washington, D.C., and sought to remake the nation’s capital to their own liking.

Their latest attempts, tacked on to a spending proposal released by House appropriators this weekend, go even further than usual, according to Democrats and local advocates.

“The policy overreach is more extreme than it’s been,” said Paul Strauss, one of D.C.’s two elected shadow senators.

While many of the provisions that made it into the Financial Services and General Government proposal for the coming fiscal year align with past efforts to curb local laws, he sees a larger pattern now that Republicans hold both chambers of Congress and the White House.

“For a conservative ideology that supports state and local control, they seem to be being very hypocritical when it comes to mandating federal overreach in this one particular area,” said Strauss, who is not an official member of Congress and instead is tasked with advocating for statehood.

The riders are part of a draft fiscal 2026 bill that was marked up by a House Appropriations subcommittee Monday and now heads to the full committee. The Senate has not yet released its own version of the bill.

New this year is language that would bar using funds to implement a local law meant to expand reproductive choices for D.C. residents. Signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser in January, the law requires insurance plans to cover vasectomies. It also offers protections to providers of abortion and gender-affirming care.

Another provision aims to squash the District’s ban on right turns at red lights, which was approved by the D.C. Council in 2022 and went into effect this year.

“In my long career representing D.C. residents in Congress, I have rarely seen a bill as unreasonable and patronizing to the more than 700,000 people who live in the nation’s capital as this one,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., in a statement.

Ankit Jain, D.C.’s second shadow senator, said he wasn’t surprised by most of the riders, though he is alarmed by Republicans’ focus on the District.

“We’ve been their political punching bag for several years, and now all of a sudden, they have all the power,” said Jain, a Democrat who is serving his first term in the role. “It’s a scary time for D.C. right now.”

Rights on red in, assisted suicide out

Restrictions on D.C. are a staple of the appropriations process. Some sail through year after year, including one known as the Dornan amendment, which prevents the District from using its local tax dollars to fund abortions. A longstanding rider has also blocked local officials from moving forward with any plan for recreational marijuana sales.

Others are purely messaging exercises and are routinely stripped out of the legislation before it ever becomes law.

In the current proposal, House appropriators have recycled many of their recent ideas, highlighting consensus Republican positions on a wide range of topics.

“The bill is loaded with … extreme policy riders taking aim at reproductive rights, rolling back D.C.’s home rule, forcing a far-right agenda to what should be a straightforward government funding bill,” said Rep. Sanford D. Bishop, Jr., D-Ga., a member of the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee, during Monday’s markup.

The bill would repeal parts of a 2018 local law that raised the age for youth sentencing alternatives and stymie a recent policing overhaul that has drawn condemnation from the GOP. It would also stop the District from implementing a law allowing certain noncitizens to vote in local elections.

It would repeal a local law allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill people, while another rider would allow anyone with an out-of-state permit to carry a concealed firearm in D.C. and on the Metro.

All of those ideas have been floated by House appropriators before. But last year’s spending process stalled out, with lawmakers opting for a full-year continuing resolution instead.

That stopgap resolution was itself a blow for local officials, imposing a roughly $1 billion budget cut on the District. While Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this year signaled his intent to restore that funding, no vote has been called. The speaker, through a spokesperson, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has mused about a federal takeover of the District to address crime, which is down significantly from a post-pandemic peak in 2023. And over the weekend Trump inserted himself into a local debate over the future of the Washington Commanders, suggesting he might try to torpedo a push to bring the football team back within District limits unless they reverse their recent name change.

“If the president is calling for increased federal control and threatening it, a lot of these Republicans are going to go out of their way to show loyalty and conformity with the president’s vision,” said Strauss, a Democrat.

So far this Congress, lawmakers have already targeted D.C. on the House floor, voting in favor of three bills to roll back local policies — including some of the policing and noncitizen voting issues addressed in the spending riders. None of those bills has gotten a vote in the Senate.

Local advocates say they fear things are trending in the wrong direction, with many Democrats joining Republicans in 2023 to kill a controversial revamping of the District’s criminal code. While D.C. has its own mayor and city council, Congress has 30 to 60 days to review local legislation before it takes effect and can block it via a joint resolution signed by the president.

The fiscal 2026 spending proposal doesn’t strictly spell bad news for D.C. It would increase yearly and lifetime caps for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program, which helps subsidize the cost of college for qualifying local students, though it would also reduce total funding for the program.

Jain said that some legacy riders, like those relating to abortion access and marijuana, would be difficult to remove. But he said he was confident many others wouldn’t end up in the final product.

“Let’s see if this Congress even passes a federal budget,” Jain said. “If they do, they’ve gotta go through the filibuster in the Senate, so we’re going to be fighting as hard as we can to get these provisions out.”

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