One of the final bills President Joe Biden signed into law makes Washington, D.C. the frontrunner to secure the Commanders’ next stadium.
Biden signed the RFK Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act on Monday, days after the legislation took a dramatic route before it made it through Congress. Within 180 days, the land will transfer from federal to D.C. control as part of a 99-year lease that makes a stadium—along with other uses—a possibility for the 170 acres.
The team played at RFK for decades before relocating to Maryland in 1997. Commanders ownership prefers the site for its next stadium, sources told Front Office Sports. But before the site became an option, D.C. needed to first gain control of it through Congress. That looked like a near certainty before Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump got involved.
Originally, the bill passing control of the stadium site to the city was part of the 1,547-page continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government that was agreed on by both parties in the House and Senate. But the CR came under scrutiny when Musk boosted an influencer’s tweet that falsely claimed $3 billion in federal funding would be used for an NFL stadium in D.C.
“This should not be funded by your tax dollars!” Musk posted on his X platform on Dec. 18.
The stadium bill never had any federal funding attached; if the federal government continued to control the site, it would have been on the hook for maintenance of the land that has sat unused for years. But after Musk’s tweet to his 200 million-plus followers that mischaracterized the RFK stadium bill and took aim at other legislation in the CR, Trump urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to scrap the spending bill.
The original CR never got a vote in the House, and a slimmer CR—without the stadium bill—eventually passed the House on Dec. 20 and then by the Senate in the early morning hours of Dec. 21 to avoid a government shutdown.
But as FOS exclusively reported, talks continued behind the scenes with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) the final holdout. After all 100 Senators were on board, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered up the standalone bill—which was approved in the House in February—via unanimous consent and it passed at 1:15 a.m. on Dec. 21.
From July of 2023, when Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) introduced the House bill, through the final hours before the Senate closed out the 118th Congress, the bill had a tremendous lobbying effort behind it. Commanders majority owner Josh Harris and others within ownership and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell went to Capitol Hill in early December to talk up the bill as part of the push to get the bill through.
“If we failed, American taxpayers across the country would have continued to pay a fortune to maintain a decaying and vacant piece of land in Washington, D.C.” Comer said in a statement on Monday. “Now, this land can be repurposed at no cost to the taxpayer to bring economic prosperity to the District.”
Washington mayor Muriel Bowser, one of the bill’s biggest proponents, told Fox 5 DC that a stadium on the RFK site could be completed before the Commanders’ goal to have a replacement for Northwest Stadium ready to open by the start of the 2030 season.
“It is a good day for DC when we finally have control of our own destiny at the RFK campus,” Bowser said in a statement released after the bill was signed. “We are ready and optimistic about unlocking the full potential of this space, and with more than 170 acres of land we can do it all—deliver housing, economic opportunity, green space, recreation, sports, and more.”
The next step in the process would be for D.C. and the Commanders to agree on the framework of a deal. With D.C. already committed to spending $515 million over the next three years to upgrade Capital One Arena—where the Wizards and Capitals play—more public money going to a Commanders stadium will likely have at least some pushback from members of the D.C. Council.
Meanwhile, Maryland lawmakers—some of whom slowed the bill’s passage—are expected to mount an effort to keep the team in the state. The Commanders own both the stadium and the 200 acres it sits on in Landover, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has pushed for the team’s next stadium to be built next to the existing one.
“We are not afraid of competition, and we believe that we can continue to build on decades of partnership with the team here in Maryland,” Moore said in a statement Dec. 17. “We are confident that Landover is still the best path to a new stadium for the Washington Commanders.”
As part of the negotiations, the Commanders have agreed to ease the pain of any potential departure. The team has agreed to cover the costs of destroying the stadium, if it comes to that, and invest in development projects on the Landover site. Moore signed the agreement with the franchise shortly before Christmas.
