The Senate voted along party lines Wednesday evening to force Washington, D.C. to adopt every tax benefit in President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act — overriding the D.C. City Council's decision last November to shield its residents from tax relief they never asked to be shielded from.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida authored the resolution of disapproval, which nullifies the Council's move to block federal tax changes — including the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime pay — from taking effect at the local level. The House passed its own version on Feb. 4 by a vote of 215-210. The measure now heads to President Trump's desk, where he is expected to sign it into law.
Read that sequence again: Congress had to pass a resolution to force a local government to let people keep more of their own money.
The D.C. City Council's November decision to block the federal tax changes was a deliberate act. The no-tax-on-tips provision alone enjoys overwhelming public support — a January Rainey Center poll found 69% of Americans back eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay. The Senate passed the No Tax On Tips Act in May 2025 by unanimous consent. Not a partisan squeaker. Unanimous.
And yet D.C.'s political class decided its residents shouldn't benefit.
According to the Daily Caller, Scott didn't mince words:
"It is absolutely absurd that self-interested D.C. bureaucrats would deliberately deny families and businesses from saving their own, hard-earned dollars. Government's top priority should be serving families, not benefiting off them."
The word "self-interested" does a lot of work in that sentence. The Council didn't block these tax cuts because it believed the policy was bad for workers. They blocked them because implementing the cuts would cost the city an estimated $600 million in revenue, according to D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. That's $600 million the District currently extracts from the tips and overtime of its workers — money D.C. leaders would rather keep flowing into government coffers than into the pockets of the servers, drivers, and hourly employees who earned it.
Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson tried a different tactic. In a Feb. 2 letter to congressional leaders, they warned of logistical chaos:
"Disapproval at this stage would create huge administrative challenges, require taxpayers to re-file their taxes, render existing guidance and forms obsolete and necessitate rapid mid-year changes to the tax administration systems."
Norton took the argument further on the House floor Thursday, claiming the current tax filing season would need to be suspended for several months to allow the District time to update its forms.
This is the governing philosophy in miniature: we blocked the tax cuts, and now that you're forcing us to implement them, it's too complicated because we blocked them. The administrative burden they're citing is entirely self-inflicted. Had the Council simply adopted the federal tax changes when they were enacted — as they were designed to be adopted — none of these filing headaches would exist. They created the problem, then pointed to the problem as the reason they shouldn't have to fix it.
Washington, D.C., isn't the only jurisdiction playing this game. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it out in December, targeting Democratic-led states — including New York, California, Colorado, Maine, and Illinois — for similar resistance:
"By denying their residents access to these important tax cuts, these governors and legislators are forcing hardworking Americans to shoulder higher state tax burdens, robbing them of the relief they deserve and exacerbating the financial squeeze on low- and middle-income households."
Note who gets hurt. Not the wealthy. Not the political donor class. Low- and middle-income households. The tipped workersare pulling double shifts. The single parent grinding overtime. These are the people Democratic leaders claim to champion in every campaign ad and fundraising email — and they are precisely the people being denied relief so that state and local governments can maintain their revenue streams.
The contradiction is structural, not accidental. The same political movement that markets itself as the defender of working people is actively blocking a tax cut for tips. Millions of tipped workers stand to benefit from this policy. The opposition isn't ideological. It's fiscal — these governments want the money.
The tax resolution is part of a broader pattern. The Republican-controlled Congress has taken several steps to conduct oversight of D.C. during Trump's second term. Last November, the House passed legislation to crack down on crime in the District, though those bills have since stalled in the Senate due to Democrat opposition.
D.C.'s unique constitutional status — governed ultimately by Congress — makes it the one jurisdiction where federal lawmakers can directly override local decisions. Republicans are using that authority. Democrats are objecting to it. But the underlying question remains straightforward: should local politicians be allowed to block federal tax relief that their own constituents are entitled to receive?
Every Senate Democrat voted against the resolution on Wednesday. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not vote, as he is recovering from flu-like symptoms. The party-line result tells you everything about where the two parties stand on letting workers keep their tip money.
Once President Trump signs the resolution, D.C. will be required to implement the full suite of tax benefits from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The administrative scramble that Bowser and Mendelson warned about will indeed occur — because they chose to delay rather than comply. The inconvenience is real. The cause of it is entirely on them.
For millions of tipped workers across the country watching jurisdictions like D.C. try to pocket their tax relief, the message from Congress is clear: the cuts are coming whether your local government likes it or not.
D.C. fought to keep taxing tips. It lost.
