When the D.C. Council created the Baby Bonds program two years ago, lawmakers said it was an intentional and potentially transformational attempt to help low-income children in the city. But a seemingly unintentional mistake by city bureaucrats has now defunded the program in its entirety, forcing lawmakers to scramble to find $54 million in a tight budget to revive it.

The unexpected drama over the program — in which low-income kids would get up to $1,000 a year deposited into an interest-bearing trust fund they could access once they turn 18, and which could be used only to buy a house, start a business, or pay for college — started in late March, when Mayor Muriel Bowser unveiled her budget for 2024.

In it, Bowser zeroed out funding for Baby Bonds, seemingly killing off the nascent initiative. Bowser’s aides later told the council the program was still getting off the ground and hadn’t yet started depositing any money for qualifying kids, and that the council had erred in not funding it for the full four-year financial plan. (In D.C., funding for most government programs has to be accounted for not just for the fiscal year to come, but also for the three years after that.)

In essence, Bowser’s team told lawmakers it was them that had screwed up, not the executive.

But the reality of what happened to the funding for the Baby Bonds became clearer late last week, when a representative from the Office of the Chief Financial Officer — the independent minder of the city’s finances — admitted that the story was more complicated than that, and involved an error made by them.

Eric Cannady, the deputy chief financial officer for the Office of Budget and Planning, told lawmakers that his office had mistakenly zeroed out funding for the program in a later year of the city’s financial plan, making it seem like the council had never funded that year to begin with.

“The process was flawed. It’s not the first time, unfortunately. But it’s the last time,” said Cannady, telling a visibly irate Council Chairman Phil Mendelson that his office’s budget formulation software requires manual inputs of some dollar amounts for subsequent years in the financial plan, instead of those amounts being automatically factored in every year. (Cannady said a planned $15 million software upgrade to address the issue had been put off because of, well, funding issues.)

“If I sound a bit edgy about this, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to Baby Bonds, the council got screwed,” said Mendelson.

The degree to which the council got screwed came into sharper relief this week. On Wednesday, D.C. CFO Glen Lee conceded to the council that the “technical mistake” by his office had opened the door for Bowser to be able to fully defund the Baby Bonds program. That’s a decision Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (I-At Large), who authored the initial bill that created the program, says he is angry about.

“I find it deeply disturbing that an accounting error made by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer would lead to a policy decision by the mayor to defund the Baby Bonds program,” he said. “This was a transformational program that the council fully funded and designed to change the odds for babies born to families that have been trapped in a cycle of poverty. The mayor should reverse her policy decision to defund the Baby Bonds program.”

In a letter to Bowser on Tuesday afternoon, McDuffie said she needs to restore the $54 million that the Baby Bonds program is expected to cost over the four-year financial plan.

Mendelson said much the same. “I’m not going to concede anything, and frankly I think the mayor and the CFO should find the money to restore what was a mistake,” he said.

Bowser’s office did not respond to a request for comment as of Wednesday afternoon. In a statement, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer said that the error it made with the Baby Bonds program’s funding would not be repeated. “We have increased the number of verifications performed during our budget development process and require validation from all relevant participants in the process, including both mayor and council staff,” said spokeswoman Natalie Wilson.

The frustrations around the fate of the Baby Bonds program aren’t isolated; Mendelson has also recently feuded with Lee over a council bill passed last year that would make Metrobus free of charge within city limits. Lee said earlier this year that funds aren’t available to pay for the program, but Mendelson countered that the CFO is wrong.

Lawmakers also say they have identified a number of mistakes and omissions in budget materials submitted by Bowser’s office, both for her proposed 2024 budget and proposed changes to the current 2023 budget. In one case, Bowser proposes using funds for an opioid legal settlement to balance the city’s overall budget, something that may not be legally permissible.

“This budget submission has been pretty sloppy, and possibly sloppier than we’ve seen in the past, and that is very concerning,” said Mendelson in an interview with DCist/WAMU.

During last week’s hearing, Cannady said that his office had set a “pencils down” moment for Bowser’s team to submit budget documents to his office for review, but the deadline had been ignored. Lawmakers say that has meant they did not receive all the required budget documents on time to start their own review, meaning they now have less time to do the work.

“For the past few years we have not received all the deliverables on the day the budget is transmitted. We don’t have full information and we make decisions based on partial information which is not fair to the body,” said council budget director Jen Budoff during a meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday.

The council will continue working its way through the proposed 2024 budget until mid-May, when it will cast its first vote on the spending plan. Whether the Baby Bonds program will be in it, though, remains unclear.

This post was updated to clarify the error made by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, and to add a statement from that office.