February 11,2026

Wyden Opposes Republican Plan to Meddle with DC's Tax Laws

Watch a video of Wyden deliver his remarks here

As Prepared for Delivery

A bit later today the Senate is going to decide whether or not to interfere with the tax policy decisions made by the elected representatives of the 700,000 people who live in the nation’s capital.

My view is, leave D.C. alone.

There are a lot of very good reasons to oppose the resolution before the Senate.

For one, anybody who listens to debates here in Congress hears an awful lot of talk from the other side about states’ rights -- the importance of making policy decisions at the state and local level. This resolution is yet another example of my Republican colleagues totally junking that proposition altogether to trample on the rights and priorities of people they don’t even represent.

Second, if the Senate passes this resolution, it’ll screw up tax filing season for thousands and thousands of residents of this city.

The D.C. government will have to spend millions fixing that mess over the course of several months. So you can forget about good government and fiscal discipline when it comes to this resolution. It’s undemocratic and wasteful.

And third -- here’s the real stunner -- if the Senate passes this resolution, it would throw out two big anti-poverty policies D.C. is implementing. A brand new child tax credit. A big expansion of the D.C.’s earned income tax credit.

So the end effect here is, thousands more kids living in poverty and higher rates of poverty overall in the nation’s capital.

The elected representatives here in D.C. looked at the city’s big economic challenges -- challenges made a whole lot worse by the Trump administration -- and decided to shore up the city’s fiscal health and bring down poverty at the same time.

I’d ask my colleagues on the other side, who are you to overrule them?

Let’s remember, if Congress sits back and leaves the District of Columbia alone, absolutely nothing changes for us, and absolutely nothing changes for the people we represent back home.

When it comes to making life better for our constituents, this is literally a waste of time. All this resolution does is stick it to a bunch of kids and families living in poverty, meddle with democracy in a city of 700,000 people, and waste millions of dollars by creating bureaucratic headaches out of thin air.

So I urge my colleagues to oppose this resolution.

###