After waiting nearly three months for Congress to fix what even many of its own members agreed was a mistake that left Washington facing a surprise $1.1 billion budget cut, city officials announced on Tuesday a plan to deal with the sizable shortfall on its own.

At an public budget presentation, Mayor Muriel Bowser said that her administration would not need to lay off workers or make substantial cuts to municipal services, as the city had feared might be necessary. Instead, local officials were able to use a 2009 federal budgeting law to boost this year’s spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. They closed the rest of the gap by temporarily freezing new hiring and making piecemeal cuts to the “thousands” of contracts, grants and other expenditures across dozens of city agencies.

“We have really blunted what could have been a catastrophic situation for city services this summer,” Ms. Bowser said.

The plan, which still needs to be approved by the D.C. Council, addresses a question that has been looming over the city for weeks. On March 8, the U.S. House of Representatives unveiled a resolution to temporarily fund the federal government while mandating a federal spending freeze. Though the District of Columbia’s budget has to be approved by Congress, such resolutions have for decades exempted the city from spending freezes, since the money it spends on services comes from locally raised taxes, not federal funds.

But that carve out was not in the House’s resolution, suddenly saddling D.C. with a $1.1 billion shortfall with the fiscal year already half over.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill allowing D.C. to keep operating according to its current budget, a measure that President Trump explicitly endorsed. But the House needed to approve the bill and in the weeks that followed nothing happened, besides some talk from right-wing lawmakers about possible amendments on unrelated issues like bans on abortion funding or reparation payments to Black residents.

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