Start with the night the crisis became undeniable. By October 1975, New York City had already cut services and fired municipal employees at scale, and it still could not cover its debts -- the city came within days of an outright default.^[1] Governor Hugh Carey's rescue had two parts. First, the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), chaired by Lazard Frères banker Felix Rohatyn, refinanced the city's debt using bonds backed by an added percentage point on the sales tax.^[1] Second, in September 1975, the state created the Emergency Financial Control Board -- chaired by the governor and dominated by his own appointees, with the actual power to set hard limits on the city's borrowing and spending.^[1] New York City's own elected government did not lose its budget to an abstraction. It lost it to a board the governor controlled.

The most famous line from the crisis was never actually said, and the real response mattered more than the myth. On October 30, 1975, the Daily News ran "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD" after President Ford refused federal aid in a speech -- he never used those words, but the backlash was immediate and real, and within months Ford approved $2.3 billion in federal loans to the city anyway.^[1] By 1976 the city had paid off its short-term debt, and the crisis was considered resolved by the early 1980s.^[1] New York's loss of budget control was real, and it was temporary -- a specific, dated emergency response to a specific, dated collapse, with a real exit on the other side of it.

DC's version of the same mechanism didn't start with a crisis -- it was written into the law that created DC's elected government in the first place. The 1973 Home Rule Act is what gives DC residents an elected mayor and council at all, and the same act explicitly reserves final authority over the District's budget for Congress: every local budget the council passes and the mayor signs still has to be reviewed and enacted by Congress before it takes effect, whether or not DC is running a surplus or a deficit that year.^[2] New York's Emergency Financial Control Board was an emergency measure bolted onto a city that otherwise ran its own budget. DC's congressional review was never bolted on. It was the condition Home Rule was granted under from day one.

And when DC did hit a real fiscal crisis of its own, Congress didn't reach for New York's version of the mechanism -- it reached for something closer and harder. By 1995, mismanagement and overspending under the Barry and Kelly administrations had left the District with a deficit of more than $700 million for the coming fiscal year.^[3] Congress didn't create a board chaired by DC's own elected mayor, the way New York's governor chaired New York's. It suspended Home Rule outright and installed the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority -- a five-member board appointed by the President, with direct power to override the decisions of DC's elected mayor and city council.^[3] It stayed in place for six years, suspending its own activity only on September 30, 2001, once the District had produced four consecutive balanced budgets.^[3] New York's elected officials kept their jobs and their authority throughout their own crisis, answering to a state board. DC's elected government was directly overridden by a federal one.

Both cities eventually balanced their books. Only one of them got its normal governance back as the reward. New York's Emergency Financial Control Board and DC's Control Board both formally exist in some reduced form even now, but New York returned to ordinary self-governance decades ago, its 1975 crisis remembered as history rather than as an active constraint. DC's congressional budget review never went anywhere, crisis or not, because it was never a response to one. New York lost its budget once, in an emergency, and the emergency ended. DC's version of losing it is just what having a budget in the nation's capital has always meant.