District of Columbia

DC’s chief executive is a Mayor, elected at-large to a four-year term with no term limits — the only big-city mayor in America who functions as governor, county executive, and mayor at once, running services that a state, a county, and a city would split anywhere else. There is no lieutenant governor; the Mayor appoints a City Administrator to run day-to-day operations and Deputy Mayors over clusters like education, public safety, and economic development. The Secretary of the District of Columbia — keeper of the seal and official records — is likewise mayor-appointed, not elected.

Two offices stand apart. Since 2015 the Attorney General has been independently elected to a four-year term, giving the District a chief legal officer who answers to voters rather than to the Mayor (Karl Racine was the first; Brian Schwalb holds the office today). And the Chief Financial Officer is a genuine oddity: appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council to a fixed five-year term, the CFO can be removed only for cause — and controls the entire financial machinery of the District, including the revenue estimates that legally cap what the Mayor and Council may spend. The office is a legacy of the 1990s control-board era, designed to keep District finances beyond the reach of any single politician.

The Council of the District of Columbia is unicameral: 13 members serving four-year staggered terms with no term limits. Five are elected at-large — the Chairman, who presides, plus four members, no more than two of whom may come from the same party in any at-large cycle, a Home Rule Act rule that guarantees minority-party or independent seats. The other eight each represent one of the District’s eight wards. It is a full-time, professional body: members earn roughly $140,000 or more a year (the Chairman over $200,000), with year-round staff and no fixed session calendar — work is organized into two-year Council Periods rather than short legislative sessions.

Below the Council sits a layer of government found nowhere else: Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. Some 300 ANC commissioners, each elected from a neighborhood of about 2,000 residents and serving without pay, weigh in on liquor licenses, zoning, and development. Their advice doesn’t bind the government, but by law agencies must give ANC recommendations "great weight" — making them the most local elected office in the country.

Within the District, the process looks familiar: a bill is introduced, referred to committee, and must pass two separate readings of the full Council, held at least 13 days apart. It then goes to the Mayor, who can sign it, veto it (the Council overrides with two-thirds of members present and voting), or let it take effect unsigned. The Mayor also holds a line-item veto over budget acts.

Then comes the step no state bill ever faces: the Chairman transmits the act to Congress, and it cannot become law until it survives a congressional review period — 30 legislative days for most legislation, 60 for acts touching the criminal code. Congress can kill the act outright by passing a joint resolution of disapproval that the President signs. That power is used rarely but really: in 2023, Congress disapproved the Council’s comprehensive criminal code revision, the first such override in decades. Because the clock runs in legislative days, not calendar days, even uncontroversial DC laws routinely wait months to take effect. And beyond the review period, Congress shapes District policy through appropriations riders — conditions attached to the federal budget that have, over the years, dictated DC policy on everything from needle exchanges to marijuana sales.

The Mayor proposes the budget, appoints agency heads, the City Administrator, and Deputy Mayors (many subject to Council confirmation), wields both a general veto and a line-item veto over budget acts, and directs a government whose scope spans state, county, and city functions — Medicaid, motor vehicles, public schools, police, trash collection.

The real limits on the office are federal, not local. The Mayor cannot spend money Congress hasn’t allowed; for decades the entire DC budget — including locally raised tax dollars — has been enacted through the federal appropriations process, where riders can override District policy. The independently elected Attorney General and the for-cause-protected CFO control the legal and financial levers that a governor’s appointees would control in a state. And in the criminal-justice sphere the Mayor’s reach is narrower still: DC’s prosecutors for most adult crimes, its courts, and even its parole decisions are federal (see below), leaving the District’s elected leadership with less control over its justice system than any state’s.

DC has its own local court system — the DC Superior Court for trials and the DC Court of Appeals as the court of last resort, the local equivalent of a state supreme court. But the judges are not chosen locally: a DC Judicial Nomination Commission screens candidates and sends a short list to the President of the United States, who nominates one, subject to U.S. Senate confirmation, for a renewable 15-year term. No state’s judges are selected this way.

Prosecution is split in an equally unusual fashion. The elected DC Attorney General handles civil matters, juvenile cases, and certain local misdemeanors — but most adult criminal prosecutions, including virtually all felonies, are brought by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, a federal prosecutor appointed by the President. DC residents elect an Attorney General who cannot prosecute the serious crimes committed in their own city.