This article appears in the August 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. For ten years, Mayor Muriel Bowser has worked on her passion project: bringing the Washington Commanders “back home” to the District of Columbia to a new stadium that would rise up phoenix-like from the old one due east of the U.S. Capitol. Long-suffering Commanders fans have wandered in the wilderness for decades, waiting for someone, anyone, to turn around the fortunes of a franchise that once won three Super Bowls but then turned into a national embarrassment. Losing seasons piled up courtesy of a team owner scarred by sexual harassment accusations, financial improprieties, and a clueless attachment to the team’s insulting former name. So deep was fans’ disgust with owner Dan Snyder, a wealthy Marylander, that fans rarely speak his name out loud unless it’s accompanied by a short expletive of Germanic origin. Forced out of the National Football League, he paid a multimillion-dollar fine for his numerous transgressions, and fled to Britain. Bowser, a native Washingtonian, understands all of this in her bones. First elected in 2015 and now in her third term, she knows that bringing the team back from Maryland will appeal to her constituents’ civic pride and stoke public support for a new stadium in the nation’s capital. What owner would want to stay in the team’s suburban outpost when he could demolish the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium—a rusting 1960s-era clamshell on the banks of the Anacostia River—and erect a new state-of-the-art stadium/entertainment district on the site? Josh Harris, another wealthy son of the DMV, materialized two years ago with $6 billion and change, to gain admission to the rarified spaces inhabited by NFL owners. For the D.C. faithful, the private equity titan’s purchase fired up the wayback machine and the mid-’80s and ’90s glory days of the Hogs, the Fun Bunch, and Doug Williams, the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and today a Commanders senior adviser. Last season, with a rookie superstar quarterback, Jayden Daniels, and a new coaching staff, the Commanders made it to the NFC title game in January. More memorable than the loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was the team’s first winning season since 1991. As the District of Columbia remains legally subservient to the federal government, the mayor needed to convince the federal government to turn the site over to the city. Her decade of persistence paid off. At the end of 2024, Congress handed Bowser a 99-year lease for the National Park Service–controlled parcels. Bowser and Harris, the Commanders managing partner, now talk about the proposed stadium and entertainment district deal with the easy familiarity of people believing themselves well on their way to getting what they want. “Now that the legislation has passed the Congress,” Bowser told an Economic Club of Washington audience in May, “we’re no longer limited to only a football stadium but housing, an entertainment district, parks and recreation, and wonderful connections to the Anacostia River.” The unleashing of the Department of Government Efficiency has decimated Washington’s federal government workforce that powers the capital’s economy. If and when a new stadium gets built—though it may be more “when” than “if”—Bowser can say she made it so. “She’s selling it as legacy,” says Neil deMause, a sports economics journalist who edits Field of Schemes, a site that analyzes public subsidies for professional sports facilities. “It’s just selling it as a gift to fans. Some of that [legacy-building] is at work with Josh Harris as well, since he is from the area originally.” The not yet signed, sealed, and delivered deal, however, is coming under fresh scrutiny for a simple reason: Washington needs a much better deal. Ten years is a long time for a mayor of a large American city to have been thinking about what this major policy decision should look like. It’s long enough to have found out what the city’s residents actually want, not just what fans or the billionaire owners want. It’s also long enough to come up with a “highest and best use” for the nearly 200 acres the site encompasses, and it’s more than long enough to decide if the site could anchor something other than a stadium—like 15,000 homes in a new neighborhood, homes that a modestly paid worker could afford, complemented by retail necessities like a supermarket and other food-centered options. In April, Bowser and the Commanders released a “term sheet,” an initial memorandum of understanding, about the RFK Stadium campus. Under its proposed terms, the Commanders and the District would fund the new stadium’s construction. Even though the city is already suffering a major budget crisis, the mayor has decided that the team shouldn’t pay property taxes or sales taxes. Only at the eleventh hour in June did the Council of the District of Columbia finally decide to pump the brakes and conduct studies. There’s a widely held assumption that Washington is recession-proof. More precisely, it’s more recession-resistant. But the unleashing of the Department of Government Efficiency by the Trump administration has decimated Washington’s federal government workforce that powers the capital’s economy. As this politically created recession bears down on the city, leading to a possible exodus of fired federal workers, giving up the major revenue opportunities that a better deal would provide seems unwise at best. Bragging rights to an NFL team or “sports capital” status won’t feed, house, clothe, educate, transport, or otherwise sustain District residents. Particularly when economic signals, from higher unemployment rates to a real estate market suddenly flush with single-family homes and condos, point to stressful fiscal times ahead. Why is such a raw deal even on the table when the city has what Harris desperately wants: a Washington address? “I’m happy to see the D.C. Council exercising a bit more leverage,” says Ebony Payne, the Ward 7 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Kingman Park, the neighborhood at the gates of RFK. “But the deal doesn’t just need a few tweaks here and there. The entire deal needs to be reworked and reimagined.” A HYPOTHETICAL COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE LISTING might describe the RFK Stadium campus this way: “Due east of the U.S. Capitol are 180 acres of very desirable waterfront property on the Anacostia River, ripe for state-of-the-art development. Originally zoned for an athletic mega-facility, new parameters allow expanded mixed-use opportunities including rental housing, restaurants, hotels, and recreation facilities. Adjacent to residential neighborhoods, the DC Armory, the D.C. Jail, “The Fields” recreation area, and parklands. On-site demolition of existing athletic mega-facility already in progress. Motivated leaseholder offers sublease with generous terms. Generational opportunity. Serious inquiries only.” “The right question here is, what would you offer if there were no stadium deal or no stadium in the picture; if D.C. treated this like another large development lot, and opened it up for an RFP and said, we’re going to do the infrastructure on this?” says Geoffrey Propheter, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. “We’re going to pay a couple hundred million dollars and prepare this land, and we’re willing to make some investments in it as well. What would you offer? What would you want to bring, and how much would you be willing to pay?” Economists who slice and dice stadium financing agree that the dealmakers selling stadiums feed on equal measures of civic pride and the fears that the team may leave town. DeMause says that in the era that produced RFK Stadium, cities, counties, or states would merely loan the funds and the team would pay the money back. “You can argue about whether it’s a good use of public money to loan money to teams, but at least the public is being made whole, right?” he says. “The problem is, since, really, the late ’80s, the landscape has just completely changed. It’s no longer the public puts up the money and then we [the team that locates there] pay rent. It’s the public puts up the money, and then we don’t give the public anything.” The Bowser administration doesn’t see these investments the same way. The mayor’s office declined a request for an interview; City Administrator Kevin Donahue responded with a statement. “Mayor Bowser and the District have a proven record of investing in sports facilities that have in turn transformed entire neighborhoods, generated new tax revenue, and supported the creation of new housing and amenities … But our partnership with the Commanders is not just about a football stadium—it’s about delivering opportunities for DC residents and businesses and unlocking 180 acres along the Anacostia River at RFK.” The mayor and the Commanders envision a 65,000-seat facility complete with a roof, team administrative offices, and parking facilities, built in two phases, to accommodate 8,000 spaces. The District of Columbia would provide $1.1 billion to construct the stadium, and the Commanders would contribute $2.7 billion above and beyond the city’s contribution. The facility would open in the fall of 2030. Thirty percent of the area would be designated for parks and recreation use. Housing and other commercial facilities would be located in a designated zone with plans for up to 800 hotel rooms and 6,500 units of rental housing; at least 30 percent of those units would be affordable. The project would create 14,000 construction jobs, which are temporary, and 2,000 permanent jobs. What the team pays for coming home is where the deal becomes surreal. The team would pay an annual rent of one dollar over the initial 30-year period for each lease: the stadium lease, the team administrative offices lease, and two parking facilities leases, with four consecutive, five-year renewals. The commercial development lease is 60 years with three consecutive renewal options of ten years each. The annual rent on the commercial development parcel is also one dollar for the first 27 years. In year 28, the rent increases to less than full market value through year 32, when the rent can max out to full market value. What isn’t even covered by the agreement are the services the city must provide to service the stadium itself, such as police, firefighters, and EMTs. Dealmakers selling stadiums feed on equal measures of civic pride and the fears that the team may leave town. Not only does the term sheet put Washington at a fiscal disadvantage from opening day, it also complicates its existing dealings with teams in the District that do pay rent. The MLB Washington Nationals pay $5.5 million each year to rent Nationals Park. Monumental Sports & Entertainment’s Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards (NBA) and the Capitals (NHL), signed a $515 million pact to stay in town after a proposed move to Alexandria, Virginia. That plan antagonized both the community and a key Virginia Senate leader whom Leonsis and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) failed to consult. The two teams will pay $1.5 million in rent this year. (Major League Soccer’s D.C. United appears to have launched the era of one-dollar rents.) Expect teams paying significantly more today to come looking for discounts tomorrow if the Commanders’ deal goes through. There’s also no PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreement with the Commanders of the sort the city has with other developments. Washington also won’t see a cent from ancillary activities at the stadium. The Commanders keep all operating revenues from stadium-based advertising (both interior and exterior), including from naming rights, sponsorships, premium seating, ticket proceeds, and food, beverage, and merchandise sales. The team also keeps all the revenues from the parking facility (which has to be ready by the opening in 2030), while the District cannot impose sales or use tax on parking or storage fees in the parking garages. It also cannot impose a sales tax on personal seat licenses, an annual fee that an individual must pay in order to buy season tickets. “The District may not be paying for the stadium [construction costs, which it shares with the team], but it gives up two to six times more in rent it could collect if it leased that land to someone else closer to market price, rather than this rent discount that is being proposed,” says Propheter. “It’s the rent terms that just makes this so different and dramatically more expensive as far as subsidies go, than anything else in the country. That is what makes this stand out from the stadium itself.” “It’s hard to wrap my head around just how big these numbers get,” Propheter continues. “It almost feels like this is Monopoly money. It’s not even real, but it is unfortunately real. So, $6 billion is the low end [of what the deal will cost]. The high end is something above $20 billion; you could build your own stadium multiple times for that amount.” The economic impact study commissioned by the mayor’s office isn’t any more uplifting. Some of the numbers do not appear to jibe with the term sheet that specifies, for example, that the team “receives and retains Stadium operating revenues” from merchandise and food and beverage, while the report asserts the opposite: that “in-stadium spending” would go to the city. It’s also difficult to take a study seriously that includes disclaimers like “All information provided to us was not verified and was assumed to be correct.” Nor is the report signed by a company official but by “CSL International,” the firm behind the study. Two professional sports teams, the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, hold ownership stakes in the company, which is not known for its analytical rigor. “That is the quintessential economic impact study for a stadium,” says Dennis Coates, a University of Maryland economics professor. “Lots of glossy bullshit, but no details on how anything was computed or justification for any of the assumptions that they make.” HAD THE AUTHORS OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL PLANNING COMMISSION’S 2006 “RFK Stadium Site Redevelopment Study” been able to follow through on transforming the area into an eastern gateway to the city, the Washington Commanders’ plan would have been moot. The planners envisioned a large waterfront park with a monument at one end. A museum or another memorial would anchor the other side of the park opposite the DC Armory. The area would be connected by pedestrian and bike paths along open spaces and recreation fields. Residences and neighborhood retail with restaurants, cafés, bookstores, as well as dry cleaners and other neighborhood services–oriented stores, were planned. The planners came up with four designs and held two months of community meetings. But the only project that was ever completed was The Fields, the recreational facilities for team sports like soccer and other activities. That area opened shortly before the pandemic. A mid-May town hall meeting in Deanwood, an African American neighborhood across the Anacostia River from the stadium, showcased the split on the project. One set of residents complained about the misplaced priorities in a city that, for starters, lacks housing that working families can afford and has yet to replace lead pipelines. African American businesspeople supporting the project wanted to make sure that they get “to be on the team” and reap the benefits that they missed out on with past megaprojects. But most Washingtonians have been strangely silent about a new stadium, which would be one of the biggest public-private infrastructure investments the city has ever seen. Nearly 60 percent of respondents oppose the deal, according to a June poll commissioned by the hotel and hospitality union UNITE HERE. An earlier Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 55 percent of Washington residents supported the project. There is none of the citywide outrage that greeted Harris’s other sports facility project, the Philadelphia 76ers plan (Harris is one of the Sixers’ owners) to build an arena next to the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. The D.C. Commanders proposal, by contrast, has specifics that to date have mobilized only individual neighborhoods. Residents of Kingman Park, a historic neighborhood purpose-built for African Americans beginning in the 1920s, are borderline apoplectic about stacked garages for 8,000 vehicles rather than a new Metro stop to alleviate traffic congestion. “I certainly don’t mind putting money into things that grow how our city moves around the right way,” says Councilmember Charles Allen, who represents the largest ward in the city and doesn’t support the stadium plan. “You’ve got a Metro station that needs to be completely rebuilt. You have the opportunity to add in a new Metro station. Where you build Metro,” he adds, “development follows.” Councilmember Wendell Felder, a project supporter who represents the stadium area, declined a request for an interview. To be sure, the proposal doesn’t displace humans, which muffles citywide outrage. Parking and access to recreation are problems that don’t galvanize residents beyond the immediate community. That is slowly starting to shift as the Commanders’ terms begin to circulate around town. Those views may shift again after public hearings slated for the end of July. The term sheet also sketches out a community benefits agreement process that would include planning for educational and recreation opportunities, and workforce development for formerly incarcerated citizens and community outreach programs for underserved community members—a staple of stadium deals since the L.A. Lakers relocated from Inglewood to downtown Los Angeles in 1999. But the community benefits language in the term sheet is vague and doesn’t match the specific terms of the stadium and commercial zone components. IN RESPONSE TO CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS’ FAILURE to restore the $1 billion they took from the District’s current budget, Mayor Bowser took advantage of a statutory maneuver to reduce the deficit to $410 billion. But that move did not stave off devastating budget cuts that will force people off health care, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits, housing vouchers, emergency rental assistance, and more. But in certain respects, choices before the city don’t boil down to deciding between a stadium and a roster of social services. The city will have to pay debt service on the nearly $1 billion capital expenditure it will commit to if the deal goes forward. Debt service payments are capped in the District’s operating budget. What the stadium spending would displace is other capital projects—like a new corrections facility. Social services allocations, which come under a different line item in the budget, are subject to the revenue crunch exacerbated by the House’s refusal to restore the city’s funding. The D.C. Central Detention Facility is long overdue to be replaced. In a July 2024 report, the Office of the D.C. Auditor documented that the half-century-old jail is one of the most overcrowded facilities in the country, with serious issues including an inmate death rate that’s three times the national average, a number of overdoses that’s ten times the average, and 400 reported incidents involving the use of force by staff. As early as 2023, city officials knew that a new jail would cost about $1 billion, that is, roughly the amount that the city plans to put into the stadium under the terms of its proposed deal. Instead, the District now plans to pursue a public-private partnership to build the facility, which would reduce the costs to the city. IN APRIL 2019, AFTER TEN YEARS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, Jeffrey S. DeWitt, then the city’s chief financial officer, warned that the District, depending on the “nature and severity” of the precipitating event, “is not insulated from recessions, and exposure to the negative impacts from a recession is probably growing, however mild or severe that recession may be.” The Great Recession and the 2001 recession’s impacts on the private sector weren’t as severe in Washington as they were elsewhere, given the countercyclical role that the federal government customarily plays in those circumstances. DeWitt concluded that federal spending helped the city stave off more severe downturns both times. He was prescient about the future, however: “Current federal fiscal policy,” he said (it was then year three of the first Trump administration) “makes it unlikely that such increases in federal spending can be counted on in the future.” That was before Trump’s second-term assaults on the federal workforce. To be sure, the DOGE shocks aren’t wholly unprecedented. In 1993, following the 1990 recession, the Clinton administration laid out its National Partnership for Reinventing Government, its ambitious clapback at the conservative cacophony about the bloated, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Vice President Al Gore headed up the 1990s version of a government efficiency commission, and the administration took a hatchet to the federal workforce: In the space of a year, some 250,000 employees lost their jobs in the pivot from civil servants to less costly contractors. Seven city councilmembers sent a letter to the Commanders in June indicating that comprehensive labor agreements are must-haves. By the end of the decade, the federal government had shed about 460,000 jobs; the District lost about 47,000 of them, or 7 percent of its workforce. The negative effects that rippled through the D.C. economy remained localized and persisted through the end of the decade. In the 1990s, the city also lost population at a rate higher than in the 1970s after the 1968 riots. Today’s DOGE cutbacks are a 9.0 on the economic Richter scale for the District: In the first four months of 2025, about 2,400 jobs have been lost. Over the next four years, 32,000 positions could disappear. Houses have surged onto the market and chat rooms are crowded with people crowdsourcing their next steps. States are trying to recruit the cast-off workers, and so are Canada, China, and France, among others. Which makes it a surreal time for D.C.’s mayor to be pressuring city councilors and trying to coax an increasingly skeptical public with the fiction that bringing home a professional football team means good jobs, housing, and recreation. Even more ludicrous is the fantasy that these jobs will be anything more than a side gig for many people, or put a dent in an unemployment rate that is starting to creep upward. Washington’s May unemployment rate was 5.9 percent, 1.7 percentage points higher than the national rate. UNIONS HAVE THEIR OWN DIFFICULTIES WITH THE PROPOSAL. On the construction side, the Commanders have committed to use a project labor agreement (PLA) to be negotiated with the Baltimore-D.C. Metro Building Trades Council for the stadium and the parking garages. But team officials have refused to sign a PLA on the mixed-use commercial development parcel. Team officials appear to be banking on their perception that the area’s unions don’t have the political clout of their Philadelphia brethren who secured comprehensive agreements with Harris during the negotiations for a downtown Philadelphia 76ers arena. (Harris later abandoned that project to sign a new agreement with his old landlord, Comcast, to replace the Sixers’ current facility in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex.) Greg Akerman, the president of the Baltimore-D.C. Metro Building Trades Council, admits that the District is “less of union stronghold than Philly.” But with thousands of construction jobs at stake and seven councilmembers supporting a more comprehensive PLA, he’s not worried: “We’re doing everything we can to make it known to the Commanders that we’re not messing around.” UNITE HERE Local 25, the metro Washington union representing hotel and hospitality workers, has met with team officials only on a few occasions. They’re still seeking a labor peace agreement that ensures a fair process for workers to organize, which can include company neutrality. “The mayor is letting them [the Commanders] get away with it,” says Paul Schwalb, the executive secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 25. Seven city councilmembers, the number needed to move any agreement forward, sent a letter to the Commanders in June indicating that comprehensive labor agreements are must-haves, just as they were in Philadelphia and at other projects in Washington. The Commanders, they made clear, shouldn’t expect otherwise. THERE IS ONE EPISODE THAT LURKS IN THE DARKEST RECESSES of the minds of Commanders fans and pols alike: the midnight flight of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis some 40 years ago. Colts owner Robert Irsay had wanted a new stadium, but the city didn’t want to meet his demands. Instead, Maryland officials planned to seize the team by eminent domain. But Irsay beat Maryland to the punch, sending tractor trailers to pack up what needed to go and having them drive off to Indianapolis. Coates, the University of Maryland professor, was a Colts fan who felt Baltimore’s pain from the Maryland suburb of D.C. where he lived at the time. “You could sense this absolute deflation, like depression, settling down over the whole city,” he says. “No mayor wants to be in charge when you know the city’s legacy gets ripped away from it.” And though William Donald Schaefer, Baltimore’s longtime mayor, reportedly cried over it, he finished up as mayor three years later and went on to serve two terms as governor. Sharon Pratt Kelly, Washington’s first woman mayor, wasn’t so lucky. In 1992, she pushed back against then-owner Jack Kent Cooke’s demands to replace RFK. “How much should a financially strapped city fork over in subsidies,” The Washington Post asked, “to keep this one man from bolting to a suburb?” Not one dime, as it turned out. So the “billionaire bully”—as she called him—took the Washington football team to Landover, Maryland, just five miles east, and Kelly lost her re-election bid. Rumblings continue about Virginia and Maryland’s interest in the Commanders. Gov. Youngkin hasn’t said anything publicly about the Commanders since his misadventures trying to move the Wizards and the Capitals to his state. Maryland’s position is murkier. The state is in deep fiscal distress, yet Gov. Wes Moore didn’t mention that in June when he told NBC4 Washington, “I want to make sure that that area [Landover] is better than what it is right now—with the Commanders there or not.” Knowing that Josh Harris is happy to negotiate on multiple fronts on any given Sunday, that’s not exactly an emphatic no. In Philly last year, Sixers officials talked about possible moves with the governors of New Jersey and Delaware while working on one deal with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and another with Comcast. The timetable for events like the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup (the facilities must be operational before the event) are bearing down on the District and the Commanders. There is also a nonzero chance that Congress or the president could intercede to override any city council decision. At a May news conference announcing Washington as the host for the 2027 NFL Draft, President Trump pronounced RFK “the best site there is” and has offered reminders that “the federal government ultimately controls it.” Since what you don’t ask for is what you don’t get afterward when it comes to dealing with professional sports teams, the city council has slowed Bowser’s roll to sign off on the term sheet. If commercial zone development is not formally incentivized or guaranteed, for example—and again, the term sheet’s language is not ironclad—a project might get built or it might fall through, particularly if there’s a major economic downturn. However, council chairman Phil Mendelson has carved out stadium bill funding separate from the city budget, so the money remains available. As of mid-July, four city councilors are definite yes votes. The agreement needs seven out of 13 councilmembers to move forward. Can they face down a billionaire NFL owner and his allies in higher places? Ed Lazere, a member of the executive committee of No Billionaire’s Playground, a citywide coalition opposing the stadium, believes that the council “will push for a better deal.” But, he says, “the key question is how hard will they fight for a really good deal?” Another group, Homes Not Stadiums, plans to pursue a citywide ballot initiative to halt the project. If approved by the D.C. Board of Elections, the measure could come up for a vote next year. Which would pose some provocative choices: Bowser appears poised to run for a fourth term. Should the Commanders’ plan advance, it could set an unwelcome precedent for municipalities. “We have to keep focused on everything that’s below the water, which is going to be billions and billions of dollars in future costs or tax money given up,” says Propheter, the University of Colorado Denver economist. “Because this could really up the ante in terms of what team owners can ask for, and set a standard where the sky’s the limit. It’s no longer a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. It’s billions and billions of dollars in each shot. There’s going to be a lot of concern about that.” There is no known universe where a single stadium, or several, spurs the kind of economic development that makes a generational impact on a city, much less a city hovering on the edge of a recession brought on by a never-before-seen implosion of its economic lodestone—the federal government. A mayor can’t fund programs with sports pride. Nothing about the current contours of the Commanders’ parasitic deal with the District changes that. It’s a football fantasy that only an NFL owner could love. POSTSCRIPT: After thunderous criticism of the initial term sheet that had the team vacuuming up all the parking and sales tax revenues for starters, the District and the Commanders reached a new, less-bad deal. The city now recoups all of those revenues. The team moves money from facility maintenance to improvements for the existing Metro station. There are also other concessions, but the way forward for PILOT payments, specific housing timeline guarantees, or increased rental payments for the stadium and commercial parcels is unclear. Given the District's' broader economic challenges, there's little enthusiasm for a pact that leaves the capital city of the United States of America reduced to the municipal equivalent of rolling pennies, while the owner ultimately takes in multiple billions. Several city councilmembers, one of them a mayoral contender, have said that the changes don’t go far enough. The hearings being held this week are opportunities for residents and other critics to sound off, but not much more than that. City councilmembers take the first of several votes on this revised term sheet on Friday. A final vote takes place after Labor Day. The latest team name game has devolved into its own drama. After Commanders Nation had finally been cajoled into accepting the new brand, President Trump stepped in with his nostalgia for the good old days. “I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site. Some fans have clapped back that the team should just use “Washington Football Team,” the neutral placeholder used after ditching the slur. Washington may have a lease and a subletter, but the federal government holds the title. Which means Congress and the president can pick up their ball and go home at any time. And so can Josh Harris.