By most measures, DC is a prosperous city. But prosperity and opportunity are not the same thing.
Spending years researching and advocating on economic policy in this city taught me that growth alone is never the answer. I led a coalition that secured $41 million for workers who had been excluded from federal pandemic relief entirely - people working in the informal economy, returning citizens, and undocumented workers - because the people who need the most support are routinely the ones our systems leave out. That experience shapes how I think about economic policy now as a Councilmember: an economy that works for DC has to work for all of us, including the small business owner on a neighborhood corridor, the worker trying to build a career here, and the resident who has never seen DC's prosperity reflected in their own neighborhood.
Right now DC faces a real economic inflection point. Federal job losses are hitting our residents hard, and we cannot simply wait for that to stabilize. We need to diversify our economy, connect recently displaced federal workers to jobs, attract employers across industries, and make DC genuinely easier to do business in, especially for minority and women-owned businesses and first-time entrepreneurs who have historically faced the most barriers. That means creating one place where new business owners can get answers and track their progress instead of bouncing between agencies with no support. It means reducing unnecessary licensing barriers that price people out of starting a career in the trades. And it means making sure that every major development deal and every public dollar spent comes with real commitments to hire DC residents and support local businesses. To that end, I recently introduced legislation to examine whether DC's tax incentive programs are actually benefiting the District, because incentives without accountability leave us with nothing to show for it.