Where is it?

The capital of the United States is in Washington, D.C., the answer the USCIS expects to this question, which appears on the civics test as a follow-up to questions about the location of major national landmarks such as the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial. Washington, D.C. (the District of Columbia) is a federal district, not a state, situated on the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia.

The capital was established by the Residence Act of July 16, 1790, signed by President George Washington, which authorized the President to select a site of up to 100 square miles on the Potomac for a new federal city to replace Philadelphia (which had served as the temporary capital). Washington personally selected the site and engaged French-born engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant to design the city's plan in 1791. The land was ceded to the federal government by Maryland and Virginia, although the Virginia portion (now Arlington and parts of Alexandria) was retroceded to Virginia in 1846.

The federal government formally moved from Philadelphia to Washington in November 1800, and President John Adams became the first occupant of the White House. The District contains the three branches of the federal government: the U.S. Capitol (housing Congress) on Capitol Hill, the White House (housing the President and the executive branch) at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Supreme Court Building across from the Capitol on First Street, NE. It also contains numerous federal departments and agencies (including the Pentagon across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia), national monuments and memorials (including the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, World War II Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial), and Smithsonian museums.

The District is governed under federal authority (the Constitution gives Congress exclusive jurisdiction over it under Article I, section 8, clause 17), but residents elect a mayor and a 13-member Council under the Home Rule Act of 1973 (Public Law 93-198). District residents can vote in presidential elections (Twenty-Third Amendment, ratified 1961, gives them three electoral votes) but have only one non-voting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives and no senators. Statehood for the District has been proposed (most recently as the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth) and passed the House in 2020 and 2021 but has not become law.