One year on from Donald Trump’s initial decision to put thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of the capital, the president has decided to extend their stay for the entire duration of his time in office. The federal government has much more direct control over the DC National Guard than that of other states.
The New York Times has the story:
The National Guard deployment, now 4,636 troops from 23 states and territories, has been extended until President Trump’s last day in office. A $292 million federal contract was recently awarded for building “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops. … The National Guard, the operation’s most visible component, is also almost certainly the most expensive. According to data that the Trump administration gave Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the deployment is expected to cost $1.4 billion from October 2026 until the end of the president’s term—on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have already been spent.
The effectiveness of the deployment is less straightforward. A June report from the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, found that the Guard had likely contributed to a decrease in property crimes—motor vehicle theft, for example, is down more than 50% year to date. But the deployment seemed to have barely any effect on violent crime, which includes murder, robbery and assaults with weapons. Robbery and homicide declined at roughly the same rate before and after the Guard arrived. This year, violent crimes in Washington are slightly above this point in 2025, driven up mostly by a large increase in assaults.
In other words, at best this is an expensive, unnecessary and useless move since it does nothing to protect Washingtonians from violent crime. At worst, it turns the Guard into a militarized force at Donald Trump’s disposal to mobilize for dangerous and antidemocratic purposes.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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