D.C. paid nearly $220 million in public-safety overtime last year - and the auditor says a lot of it was avoidable

Why this lands on every D.C. resident's doorstep

Washington's public-safety agencies - the Metropolitan Police Department, Fire and Emergency Medical Services, and the Office of Unified Communications - spent nearly $220 million on overtime in fiscal year 2025. That is money drawn from the same general fund that the D.C. Council just spent weeks fighting over, the same pot now under pressure from a $1.1 billion budget gap and a Congress eyeing the District's taxing power. The overtime bill did not pay for more cops on the street. Much of it paid for the same officers to keep showing up because their colleagues were out on leave.

That is the blunt finding of a data brief released July 22 by the Office of the D.C. Auditor, titled D.C. Public Safety: Too Much Overtime, Too Few Staff? D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson did not pull punches.

The numbers

D.C. public safety agencies spent nearly $220 million on overtime last year, with staffing shortages and employee leave driving costs, the audit found. The breakdown is striking. MPD alone accounted for $134 million in overtime, and officers took an average of eight weeks of leave.

Fire and EMS tells a different story. The department was about 95 percent staffed but still spent roughly $50 million on overtime in 2025. Firefighters took an average of eight to 11 weeks of leave, increasing the need for overtime coverage.

Then there are the 911 dispatchers. The Office of Unified Communications dispatchers were unavailable for duty for 11 weeks on average last year. Eleven weeks. For the people who answer emergency calls.

The report from the Office of the D.C. Auditor said that there is not enough staff for 24/7 jobs, causing overtime costs to pile up. Instead of hiring more employees to work the hours needed, D.C. agencies are paying "exorbitant amounts of overtime" to a smaller number of existing employees.

Not just a staffing problem

Patterson's framing matters. The conventional defense agencies offer for overtime spending is that they are shorthanded - and that is partly true for MPD, which has struggled to hit authorized staffing levels for years. But the auditor is pointing at something else: leave, not staffing, accounted for a lot of the overtime, and agencies are paying "exorbitant amounts" of overtime to a small number of employees.

Some of the overtime is because of short staffing, but not all. "Some of our prior chiefs did a better job than some of our current chiefs have, bringing down discretionary overtime," Patterson said. That is a direct shot at current agency leadership - one line in a data brief, but it points to a management failure that goes beyond headcount.

Patterson said: "We need a better understanding of what the staffing should actually be in these agencies as well as better management of leave use to bring down the high costs of overtime. That may well include more attention to worker healthcare needs - whatever is driving the numbers unavailable for duty."

Translation: the auditor does not yet know whether 11-week average absences reflect a workforce with genuine health and burnout problems, a culture of loose leave management, or both. That ambiguity is itself alarming. The city is spending $220 million a year on a phenomenon it has not fully diagnosed.

Why timing matters - a lot

This report landed the same week the House Oversight Committee advanced the D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act. The House Oversight Committee approved the Republican-backed bill on a party-line vote, sending it to the full House. Under current law, the D.C. Council can approve local tax changes, which then take effect unless Congress takes action to block them. The proposed legislation would reverse that process, requiring an affirmative vote from Congress before any new D.C. tax or fee increase could move forward.

The House Oversight Committee advanced the bill with a 23-to-18 vote; it now goes to the full House. The House is in recess until late August, meaning the timing for the debate and vote remains to be set. Congress comes back from recess this month.

The connection is direct. The District faced a $1.1 billion budget gap, partially caused by the downsizing of the federal workforce and slowed revenue growth. The D.C. Council approved the FY2027 budget, but the chief financial officer warned it could be "unbalanced," after councilmembers tapped $150 million from District reserves to restore some cuts proposed by Mayor Muriel Bowser. Against that backdrop, a $220 million annual overtime bill is not an abstract line item. It is money the city does not have to spare.

According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, the Taxing Authority Review Act would also pose a risk to D.C.'s credit ratings. "Credit downgrades would create higher costs for D.C., putting an even bigger squeeze on the District's budget and ability to maintain healthy finances," wrote DCFPI Executive Director Erica Williams. A credit downgrade would make it more expensive for the city to borrow - which it relies on for everything from school construction to fire station renovations.

At-large Councilmember Robert White put it plainly when the tax bill advanced: "This bill would be devastating. It would let a Congress that can't even keep its own government open decide whether D.C. can fund its own police, schools, and services. Our budget would become a request we send to Congress that dies the moment they ignore it."

The political context the auditor's report complicates

Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs House Oversight and wrote the tax bill, has pointed specifically to mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George, who supports implementing a business activity tax - a measure the D.C. Council has funded a study on to see if and how it could work in the District. His argument, broadly, is that D.C. has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

The overtime report does not settle that debate, but it hands Comer's allies a data point. The auditor's report said: "Overtime has been and continues to be a costly and chronic phenomenon among the District's public safety agencies." That sentence will show up in congressional testimony. Count on it.

Patterson, for her part, is not calling for cuts. She is calling for answers. Officials did not make formal recommendations, but suggested that the City Administrator and the Department of Human Resources need better oversight of leave use and staffing levels across public-safety agencies. The report stops short of prescribing how agencies should respond - a deliberate choice that leaves the next mayor and the next Council to decide what to do with the findings.

That matters, because the people who will inherit this problem are not yet in office. Lewis George takes over as mayor in January. Several Council seats are on the November ballot. The D.C. Auditor separately released, on August 5, its fiscal year 2024 annual report on the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions - a reminder that the oversight apparatus is churning out findings faster than the political system is acting on them.

What the OUC numbers say about 911 service

The overtime story at the Office of Unified Communications deserves separate attention. Eleven weeks of average leave per dispatcher is not just a budget problem. It is a service-delivery problem. OUC has faced years of criticism over call-answer times and staffing levels; the auditor's finding that a significant share of the workforce is routinely absent adds new texture to those complaints. Whether that absenteeism reflects burnout in a high-stress job, inadequate sick-leave policies, or management failures is exactly what Patterson says nobody in the Wilson Building has answered yet.

The auditor released the full data brief on dcauditor.org. The raw numbers are there. Nobody in the Bowser administration has responded publicly with a plan.

What D.C. Residents Should Watch

• The full House vote on H.R. 9720, the D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act, expected after Congress returns from recess in late August. If it passes the House and clears the Senate, every future D.C. tax change - up or down - would require a 60-day congressional sign-off. Track the bill at Congress.gov.
• A response from the Wilson Building. Mayor Bowser's office and the City Administrator have not publicly responded to the auditor's overtime findings. Watch for testimony or budget amendments in the fall session that address leave-management and staffing-formula reforms.
• OUC call-answer data. The Office of Unified Communications publishes quarterly performance reports. Given the auditor's 11-week average leave finding, the next OUC report - due this fall - will be worth reading against the overtime numbers.
• The incoming administration's position. Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George has not yet staked out a public position on the overtime report. Her transition team's response, if any, will signal how seriously the next administration plans to take agency leave reform before she takes office in January.
• MPD sworn-officer count. Patterson noted that some overtime is legitimate - arrests don't end at shift change. But discretionary overtime is a management variable. Watch MPD's monthly overtime reports at mpdc.dc.gov for whether the trend line changes.

Sources: Office of the D.C. Auditor, July 22, 2026; WTOP; Washington Informer; Washington City Paper; The Georgetowner; Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton's office; House Oversight Committee; MPD Overtime Reports FY26