D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser vetoed two bills this week, one that would break up the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs into two separate agencies and another that would create a new ombudsman to oversee the Child and Family Services Agency, which could soon come out from federal oversight from a decades-long class-action lawsuit.

Bowser has only vetoed a handful of bills in her six years in office, and and has been overriden by the D.C. Council in all but one case. Both of the bills she vetoed this week passed the Council unanimously, indicating more overrides may soon come.

The DCRA-breakup bill was first introduced by Council Chairman Phil Mendelson in early 2018, and sought to address longstanding problems with the agency — which does everything from issue building permits to inspect businesses — by creating two new agencies in its stead. One would handle building permits and inspections, the other business licensing and consumer protection.

In a letter to Mendelson on Wednesday, Bowser said the bill “slows the steady progress being made by the agency [and] wastes a significant amount of taxpayer dollars to duplicate personnel and infrastructure already in place.”

“By passing this legislation,” she wrote, “the Council will shift the agency’s attention from providing quality service to District residents and businesses and instead to having to focus enormous amounts of energy on planning for and implementing an agency split.”

Bowser also raised a point that lawmakers themselves admitted could delay the bill’s implementation: splitting up DCRA would cost $33.1 million over the next four years, and the D.C. budget has already been strained by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The other bill was introduced by Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau and would create an independent ombudsman for CFSA, the city’s public child welfare agency. While an ombudsman’s office already exists within CFSA, Nadeau said its staff could be subject to “undue influence” from the agency officials who ultimately hire and fire them. Nadeau also said the existing ombudsman’s office wasn’t created through legislation, so any future leader of CFSA could eliminate it easily.

But in her letter to Mendelson, Bowser said the bill violates the city’s Home Rule Act by seeking to create a new agency that would carry out executive branch functions but has a director who would be appointed only by the Council. “This structure… is a violation of the constitutional principle of separation on powers,” she wrote.

Bowser also said the new ombudsman’s office would be unnecessarily large for the number of complaints the current ombudsman handles on an annual basis.

A number of child welfare organizations spoke in favor of the bill during a public hearing in late 2019, but the current court-appointed monitor of the agency said moving the ombudsman outside of CFSA would make it less effective — though she did support strengthening the existing office.

In 1989, CFSA was subject to a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of the city’s abused and neglected children. A federal judge found that the agency was in “shambles,” and ordered a range of changes and improvements be made under the oversight of a court-appointed monitor. (In 2019, the Washington City Paper reported CFSA was “cutting corners” in order to get out from federal oversight.) Last August, a federal judge approved a preliminary settlement of the lawsuit.

It takes nine of the Council’s 13 members to override a mayoral veto.