It is easy to understand why some people who live in Washington are nervous about a second Trump administration. Vice President Kamala Harris won 93 percent of the vote in the nation’s capital and Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness in recent years to intervene in D.C.’s political affairs.

But Mayor Muriel Bowser’s openness to working with the incoming administration proves the relationship between the federal and local government doesn’t have to be contentious.

I started my 15-year career in the D.C. government during Adrian Fenty’s administration and saw firsthand how residents benefit when the federal and local governments work collaboratively. The Connect.DC program, which I led for close to a decade, was started with grant funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

We used federal and local dollars to provide technology training and information on affordable internet service to low-income adults, ex-offenders, senior citizens and K-12 students. The program also converted a bookmobile into a techmobile that provided digital access to residents in public housing.

There is no reason intergovernmental partnership can’t work today, especially to benefit the working-class residents in D.C. who vote Democrat but are not partisan ideologues.

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Education is one potential area for bipartisan agreement. The District already has a robust system of public charter schools, but the DC Opportunity Scholarship—the only federally-funded voucher program—has been in the crosshairs of the last two Democratic presidential administrations. President Trump promoted the program and restored funding for it in his first term. Doing it again would probably come as a relief to low-income families who see vouchers used as a political football by politicians who send their children to elite private schools while parroting the anti-choice rhetoric of the National Education Association.

Another area of potential collaboration is public safety. I spent my last year in the D.C. government with the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and saw firsthand how violent crime affected every part of the city. Violent crime is down in 2024, but it was only one year ago that a sitting councilmember was calling for the National Guard to help quell the violence claiming the lives of his constituents.

The Biden administration launched its own gun violence prevention office in 2023, but it is unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will keep it. What is clear is that the mayor, city council and residents sound nothing like the “defund the police” activists who ignore the plight of law-abiding citizens because of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. That means there should be an opportunity for conservatives and progressives to work together to reduce violent crime in the District.

Finally, the incoming Republican majority and the D.C. government should find a way to work together on keeping families together. Progressive policymakers often look to “root causes” like systemic racism, mass incarceration and gentrification to explain persistent differences in group outcomes. For some reason, however, family structure does not make their list.

But family structure obviously contributes to disparities in the District. About 80 percent of babies in Ward 8 are born to unmarried mothers, while 90 percent of babies in Ward 3 go home to a married mom and dad. New programs focused on student achievement and violence prevention will have limited long-term effects unless elected officials are willing to acknowledge that the outcomes they measure in the schoolhouse and courthouse are all downstream from the inputs families provide at home.

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Now is the perfect time to try a new approach to strengthening families in D.C., especially since the federal government has grants earmarked for that purpose. One idea to address the economic needs of families and highlight the importance of a child’s home environment is a marriage “bootcamp” for cohabiting couples with children. This type of program could be run by a local church or nonprofit and would cover important topics like money management, fidelity and conflict resolution.

The program could culminate with a collective wedding ceremony where all the couples who successfully completed training are married at the same time. Couples could also be paired with an older mentor couple. But the biggest innovation would be the monetary incentive for couples to get—and stay—married. For example, each couple that completes the program could choose either a $10,000 gift on their wedding day or a $20,000 loan that is fully forgiven after 10 years.

The city has already demonstrated its willingness to support families when it announced a pilot program to give low-income mothers $10,800 over the course of one year, either as a lump sum or in monthly payments. Family policies supplementing household income are well-intentioned, but they lack long-term vision without a specific focus on marriage and family structure. If Republicans come to the bargaining table with reasonable reforms like the ones I suggested above, Democrats should be willing to make a deal.

The nation’s capital should be a model for how Democrats who govern our largest cities and Republicans who increasingly represent the working class can come together on behalf of the voters who put them in office.

Readers should be under no illusions that this bipartisan collaboration will magically appear in a second Trump administration, but policymakers and residents of D.C. alike would do well to approach the next four years with collaboration, not conflict, in mind.