With his annual new fiscal year budget recommendations coming this Monday, Falls Church City Manager Wyatt Shields will be flying blind to some extent, like all the rest of us wide-eyed and reeling from the thoughtless and deep federal program cuts emanating out of the White House. His budget plan will address all the major issues our local jurisdiction faces, including giving the School Board all it’s asking for this go around, and on top of that, he may propose a two cent real estate tax rate reduction. If he doesn’t, surely the F.C. City Council will be looking to do it and maybe more by the time it finally votes on its budget in May.

But Shields’ budget will be buffeted on all sides by the looming aura and practical realities of what the Trump-Musk administration is doing, unable to take the consequences fully into account at this early stage. But it is shaping up as a perfect storm for the entire region. Massive federal and federal contractor job losses resulting in plunging residential real estate values and collateral havoc in the service sector could spell a bonafide catastrophe. Some may argue this is only temporary, or not actually so bad, but insofar as it fits with the parameters of the so-called Project 2025 plan to deconstruct the administrative state, as authored not by Trump or Musk but by the likes of Russell Voight, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, it is indeed intended to become our new reality.

So, make no mistake, this is a dead serious matter for all our regional jurisdictions and therefore, we feel it is incumbent on our local government to be ready with emergency options, or a roadmap to exercise them, as this unfolds. There need to be priorities set, for example, between what are programs that need to be genuinely maintained and those which can be delayed or cancelled. There need to be hotlines readied between jurisdictions to address emergencies that arise. 

There also needs to be transparency in all this, too. Our leaders need to be forthcoming and telling us what they’re doing to be ready for the storm that is coming. Given the ugly realities we are likely to be encountering, are efforts underway to accommodate a mass of delinquencies, for example? What about support for local restaurants that suddenly experience a major loss in business? Is there a fund, or is one being set up, to help with this? If so, we need to know.

Most of all, there needs to be an extraordinary effort put into resisting an “every man for himself” approach by jurisdictions. There need to be overarching institutional mechanisms set up to carry the weight of the crises that are already coming down on us. Great credit needs to go to our Congressman Don Beyer for organizing the resource fair held last weekend at Wakefield High School in Arlington. Many more are called for.