The commonly accepted story about the U.S. welfare state is that it developed between the 1930s and the late 1960s and then suffered a series of policy and political setbacks during the 1970s, which triggered a political backlash. Conservative politicians from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan successfully harnessed white middle-class anger over government programs in order to roll back the welfare state. At first glance, the fate of federal programs that subsidize apartments for low-income tenants confirms this narrative: the federal government created housing programs during the New Deal; it added to them significantly during the 1960s. In the late 1960s and 1970s, bad press, conservative attacks, and policy mistakes triggered cutbacks in the 1980s.

Political scientists have long debated the nature of the American political system, particularly the degree to which the federal government is amenable to major policy initiation and reform. There are two basic schools of thought on this question. One school—which I will call the stasis school—argues that the system is highly resistant to major change. The other school of policymaking—which I will call the dynamic school—emphasizes the openness and responsiveness of America's political system and the relative ease of generating reform at the national level. While the stasis and dynamic schools are helpful in explaining systemic tendencies and the influence of particular forces on the policy process, they are less useful in illuminating the evolution of governmental policymaking in a single issue area over time.

There has always been something problematic, if not anomalous, about the political status of the District of Columbia. In theory, the federal government reigns supreme. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” in the territory that houses the seat of government, but it is not clear whether that rules out some measure of popular representation in local government. For Congress to exercise exclusive authority over the capital of the Republic, in denial of the inhabitants' right to govern their own affairs, might seem a stark contradiction of the founding principles of American government. “This, happening at the seat of a nation which boasts of its democratic government,” observed a writer in the Atlantic Monthly in 1909, during a period when the District was subject to direct federal control, “constitutes a solecism of the first magnitude.” Over the 204 years of its residence there, Congress has both allowed and disallowed local representation. For most of its first seventy years, Washington was governed by an elected mayor and councils. (The city of Georgetown and the rural sections of the District, known as Washington County, had their own separate governing arrangements.) The conduct of municipal government in the antebellum period was not dissimilar to that in other cities of comparable size, with the important distinction that Washington, like the rest of the District, was subject to the supreme authority of Congress. That authority, however, was exercised fitfully by a national legislature whose preferred stance toward the District was one of benign neglect. Whatever practical inconvenience might result from this arrangement was not judged sufficient to warrant a serious reconsideration, that is, until the Civil War and its aftermath drastically raised the stakes and altered the significance of governing the District.