A $905M order for Metro's next-generation railcars, a $900M reinvention of the National Air and Space Museum, an $819M sewer tunnel boring beneath the Potomac riverfront and a $524M CISA headquarters rising at St. Elizabeths headline the District's public pipeline — a capital city rebuilding its federal front door and its neighborhood schools and libraries at the same time.
*How to read the total: the sum of the published figures in the list below. Bases differ by project — most are total cost estimates, some are federal grants, program totals, or construction contracts as awarded. Each project's expanded view labels its own basis. We add them up with the labels showing rather than pretend they're all the same kind of number.
Hover a pin for the project snapshot. Pin numbers match the project list below. Locations are approximate (nearest city or corridor midpoint) on a schematic outline.
Click any project to expand its full record — description, owner, dates, funding, the law behind it, and its source. Filter by who owns it and where it stands, or sort by cost.
16 major public projects are listed. The listed figures sum to $5,995,318,060 (≈$6.0B). Bases differ and are labelled on every record: WMATA's approved capital-program project totals, one firm design-build contract (the $819M Potomac River Tunnel), one federal construction award (CISA headquarters, ≈$524M), one federal funding commitment (Union Station, $465.8M), District capital-plan full-funding costs, and mayoral-release figures for the three September 2026 completions. This is a majors list, not a census: the District's capital budget, DDOT's bridge and paving programs, DC Water's wider capital program (including Blue Plains plant work, which is program-level rather than a single priced project) and the federal MILCON and GSA pipelines all carry further projects below this page's $10M published-figure threshold or without a single published figure. Owner mapping for the District, applied as written: agencies of the Government of the District of Columbia (DDOT, DC Water, DC Public Schools, the Department of General Services, DC Public Library) are listed as municipal; federal owners (Smithsonian Institution, General Services Administration, Federal Railroad Administration/Amtrak) as federal; and WMATA — a public interstate authority of the District, Maryland and Virginia — as federal-state. Three records are 2026 completions, all of them September 2026 openings of neighborhood buildings.
Completed in a prior year, however large: the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge (opened September 2021); Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center GW Health in Ward 8 ($434.4M District-funded, opened April 15, 2025 — the only full-service hospital east of the Anacostia River); and Phase 1 of WMATA's Bladensburg Bus Garage (opened July 2025 — a partial opening; the project is listed here as under construction because Phase 2 runs to December 2028). Terminated, named not listed: the $8.8B Washington Union Station expansion (Alternative F), scrapped by the U.S. Department of Transportation on July 24, 2026 in favour of a public-private replacement to be developed with $24M of planning money — neither figure is counted on the Union Station record, which carries only the $465.8M near-term improvements funded in May 2026; and the DC Streetcar — the H Street/Benning Road line's service ended on March 31, 2026 under the District's FY2026 budget, and its Benning Road extension was dropped years earlier, so the streetcar is documented here as ended, never as suspended. Private, excluded and named: the Washington Commanders' new stadium at the RFK campus is a private team project (the District's separate public roadway and infrastructure work around the campus is enabling work, not a stadium record) — as are the District's large private office, residential and mixed-use builds generally. Counted on a neighbouring page: the $2.3B Long Bridge rail project is owned by the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority; its northern package physically sits in the District (East Potomac Park to L'Enfant) but the owner is a Virginia authority, so it is named here and excluded from this tally. Unpriced planning, named not listed: the District's proposed Correctional Treatment Facility annex (a new jail at 1900 Massachusetts Avenue SE) — a May 2026 request for information carried a target budget range of $1.2–1.5B with the delivery model undecided, which is a range at procurement-exploration stage, not a published project figure.
Three disclosures run through the page. Softest records: Benning Road Bridges (dc-009) and the Congress Heights Library (dc-016) rest on District capital-plan documents whose printed milestones are stale or conflict with 2026 mayoral reporting — both conflicts are printed on the records rather than resolved silently. The Theodore Roosevelt Bridge cost (dc-011) rests on ARTBA industry reporting because DDOT publishes the rehabilitation's scope and schedule but no price; it is the one cost on this page not carried by an owner or agency document. Composed figures: the Air and Space Museum's $900M is the Smithsonian's own composition ($650M of appropriated building money plus $250M of privately raised exhibition money) and not the roughly $1 billion of 2026 press rounding; the two WMATA garages are counted at the approved FY2027–FY2032 capital program's totals ($790.4M and $541.0M), which supersede the lower figures ($471M, $420M) still circulating from earlier years — the increases are disclosed on each record. No project on this page is listed as suspended: nothing with a verified pause was found, and the two famous stoppages (the Union Station expansion and the streetcar) are terminations, documented as such above.