A draft federal spending bill unveiled by House Republicans on Wednesday would impose a broad slate of new and old policy restrictions on D.C., from maintaining the eight-year-old ban on legalizing marijuana sales to prohibiting the city from using traffic cameras — a move that would immediately throw the city’s budget into deficit, likely requiring significant spending cuts or tax increases.

The proposed policy riders — provisions of the federal budget that require or prohibit something from being done — were included by the Republican majority of the House Appropriations Committee in a draft $25 billion spending bill for financial services and general government. The bill includes specific federal payments to D.C., such as for the city’s court system and to help cover security costs related to the federal government’s presence.

And while budget riders have been an unpleasant political reality for D.C. since it gained limited home rule 50 years ago, the new Republican proposal includes a broad menu of riders that target everything from hot-button issues like abortion to more pedestrian issues like, well, pedestrian safety.

The spending bill would maintain a longstanding prohibition on D.C. subsidizing the costs of abortions for low-income women, and forbid the city from using any federal funds it receives on needle-exchange programs. It would also extend the ban on legalizing marijuana sales first imposed by Republicans in 2015, which city officials say has left them with few tools to regulate marijuana sales that are already happening under the guise of “gifting.”

The bill would also repeal D.C.’s seven-year-old law legalizing physician-assisted suicide, prohibit the city from spending money to enforce a law preventing employer discrimination against employees for their reproductive health decisions (a Republican target since 2015), and expand the number of private schools where D.C. parents can spend federally funded tuition vouchers.

And on an even more granular level, the spending bill would prohibit D.C. from implementing a new law to prohibit drivers from making right turns on red lights by 2025. This move harkens back to the mid-1980s when the national legislature got similarly involved in local traffic-related matters by prohibiting taxicabs from using meters in favor of the long-maligned zone system. The Republican bill would also ban the city from using traffic cameras to issue fines to drivers who run red lights or speed.

“These riders are not just anti-home rule, they are actually harmful to the District,” said Council Chairman Phil Mendelson in a statement.

That could be especially evident in the case of the city’s roughly 140 traffic cameras, which could grow to more than 500 under the 2024 budget the D.C. Council approved in late May. While the presence of the cameras has long been controversial, city officials and advocates say they encourage people to drive more safely. They also pull in more than $100 million in revenue from fines on an annual basis — money that would disappear under the Republican proposal. (Much of that money is set aside for traffic safety improvements.) And since by law the city’s budget has to be balanced (unlike the federal budget) lawmakers would have to make up for the lost revenue by cutting spending or raising taxes.

“The riders will throw our budget out of balance by hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Mendelson. “Republican House leaders have criticized the District for being poorly run, even though we have one of the most fiscally stable governments in the nation, and now they propose to truly throw it out of whack.”

On Twitter, Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large) was less diplomatic, saying the Republican appropriators are “not serious people.”

“D.C. has surpassed a 50% increase in traffic fatalities when compared to this time last year, but House Republicans want to prohibit us from spending LOCAL [dollars] to stop certain right turns on red and automated traffic enforcement?!?! Be serious,” she wrote.

“Also 23 states have legalized recreational use of cannabis for adults 21 years and older. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. AND YET this stale prohibition by the Congress to allow D.C. to properly regulate its market persists. 🙄 Some of this stuff defies logic,” she added.

In a statement, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said she was pleased that the spending bill would allocate $40 million to the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program, which gives students from D.C. high schools access to grants to help cover portions of the tuition at any state university in the country. But she also said she was “outraged at the anti-home-rule riders in the bill.”

The Republican proposal comes during a year where D.C. has faced increasing interference in its local affairs from Congress. Republicans successfully led the charge to block a bill passed by the council that revised the city’s century-old criminal code. More recently they announced plans to introduce a bill to require photo ID for voting in the city, ban same-day voter registration, and largely do away with popular mail voting. While President Joe Biden did recently veto an attempt to repeal a D.C. police discipline and accountability bill and any spending bill would have to make it through a Democratic-led Senate, D.C. has been used as a bargaining chip in political negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in the past.

The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to debate and vote on its spending bill Thursday morning.

“These constant attacks on our autonomy are undemocratic, reckless, harmful, and serve no purpose but to score political points nationally while disrupting our government,” said Mendelson. “I urge Congress to reject these proposals and get to its real work to support District residents, like passing common-sense gun legislation, confirming judges, and supporting our police.”