DC Mayor Muriel Bowser Says She Had ‘Great Meeting’ With Trump
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has often cast Washington, DC, as an urban hellscape, but the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said she had a “great meeting” with the president-elect on Monday and came away “optimistic that we will continue to find common ground.”
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During this year’s presidential campaign, Trump depicted the District of Columbia in dystopian terms. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, DC and clean it up, renovate it, rebuild our capital city so there’s no longer a nightmare of murder and crime,” he said at a rally in August.
Bowser, a Democrat, said in a statement posted on X that “we discussed areas for collaboration between local and federal government, especially around our federal workforce, underutilized federal buildings, parks, and green spaces and infrastructure.”
She did not say where the meeting took place.
Since Trump won the election, proposals by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash government spending — and employees — has generated considerable anxiety in the District and in neighboring Virginia and Maryland, a region where federal spending and government employees have long played a major economic role.
Yet one aspect of the Musk-Ramaswamy plan has attracted the enthusiastic support of local business and government leaders — a return to office policy after working from home became the norm during the Covid pandemic. Like many big city mayors, Bowser has said seeing government workers back in the office would go a long ways toward helping revive downtown businesses.
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