First, they said they couldn’t meet the deadline because AVs hadn’t been deployed in other cities. After that was no longer true, they blamed Congress for cutting the city’s budget, even though DDOT continued to pay the consultants on the project, which will end up costing more than $300,000 over three fiscal years. That’s a tiny fraction of the agency’s $185.3 million budget in 2025, but the council deserves the report it mandated six years ago.