On October 26, 2026, Executive Director Yesim Sayin was quoted in the GW Hatchet about D.C.’s tax increase proposals:
Yesim Sayin, the Executive Director of the D.C. Policy Center, a nonprofit organization focused on researching the impact of public policy in D.C., said a lack of feasibility and implementation difficulties, because many of the taxes are very slow-moving, hinder some of the tax proposals and reduce their ability to solve real problems.
She said the city should ensure that expenditures grow at a similar rate to the economy’s growth every year, which has not been happening. She said the city needs to better understand the cost drivers that are increasing operations costs in order to react appropriately through legislation.
“Every year the city raises revenue to do something or the other, and next year they come back and you know the revenue is there, but it’s not enough to pay for the thing that they promised to do,” Sayin said. “There’s something else in the budget that’s eating up that fiscal capacity.”
Read more: As DC Council weighs tax increases, experts raise affordability concerns