The military forces deploying in Washington, D.C. — whose mission includes not only “community safety patrols” but assisting in “traffic control” and “area beautification” — could cost upward of $1 million per day, with the possible price tag climbing into the hundreds of millions for the open-ended occupation, according to expert analysis.
Washington is now ground zero in President Donald Trump’s push to turn America into a full-fledged police state.
The power grab in the District of Columbia — which thus far has involved seizing control of D.C.’s police force, deploying National Guard troops, and flooding the streets with federal officers — follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and consistent tyrannical use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history.
Trump has brushed off being called a “dictator” since his capital city putsch, which he touted as a law enforcement operation and urban beautification campaign.
The Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee announced, in the last several days, that they will send National Guard troops to assist Trump’s efforts to “federalize” D.C. Those forces will join the nearly 900 D.C. National Guard troops already activated by Trump and deployed in the capital.
Approximately 500 National Guard members from West Virginia had arrived in the capital by Monday afternoon, according to a defense official who spoke to The Intercept on background. Around 300 troops from South Carolina were en route, the official said. (South Carolina’s Gov. Henry McMaster only publicly authorized the deployment of 200 Guard members.) All told, around 2,100 troops will soon be deployed.
The Intercept asked Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, to estimate the possible expense of this operation. Her analysis finds that the cost of Trump’s troop deployment in Washington could exceed more than $1 million per day, based on the deployment of around 2,100 Guard members to D.C.
“It’s unconscionable that the Trump administration would hand the military a blank check of over a million dollars a day to occupy D.C. while stripping access to health care and food aid from millions of families across the country,” Homestead told The Intercept. “The daily cost of the D.C. troop deployment is more than six times what it would cost to operate affordable housing for D.C.’s entire unhoused population. The government’s priorities could not be more clear.”
“The daily cost of the D.C. troop deployment is more than six times what it would cost to operate affordable housing for D.C.’s entire unhoused population.”
Homestead based her calculations on recent National Guard deployments where the total number of troops, cost, and deployment length are publicly available but cautioned that government secrecy makes it impossible to account for all variables including lodging, transportation, equipment usage, and other expenses.
Homestead noted that since Trump began his federal power grab, more than 450 people have been arrested. “Describing the National Guard deployment as a glorified gardening mission is an attempt to whitewash the danger of the expanding police state,” she told The Intercept. “It directly contradicts reports of what is actually happening on the ground: Troops aren’t picking up trash or planting flowers, they are operating checkpoints and helping make hundreds of arrests of mostly Black and brown residents.”
The Pentagon claims it does not know the costs of these National Guard deployments, leaving taxpayers on the hook for inestimable costs. “We won’t know the cost until the mission concludes,” another defense official told The Intercept, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The first defense official expressed skepticism of this claim of total unknowability, intimating that the Pentagon does, or at least could, have an idea of the cost: “The concern is they don’t want anyone pinning them down, saying, ‘Oh, you said it’s going to cost this much, but actually it cost a lot more.’”
The ultimate length of the deployment is unspecified, leaving open the possibility that it could last for months or longer, driving costs into the tens or hundreds of millions by Homestead’s estimate. Trump suggested that funding for his D.C. takeover — including rousting homeless camps, removing “all” the city’s graffiti, and tending to “grasses” in the parks — would cost a “relatively small amount of money.”
“Spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy the National Guard to the nation’s capital, whether to address an imagined increase in violent crime or in support of immigration enforcement missions, is a massive distraction from the military’s mission,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “It undermines readiness, pulls resources and personnel from other missions, and dangerously blurs the lines between military and civilian jurisdictions.”
Despite Justice Department figures showing that violent crime in the D.C. was already at a 30-year low, Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington on August 11. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said at a White House news conference that day, painting the city as a hellscape filled with “drugged out maniacs” and “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,” he declared.
The National Guard deployment is one facet of Trump’s efforts to put the District of Columbia under federal authority. He also declared that he is temporarily taking control of the city’s police department. Hundreds of officers and agents from more than a dozen federal agencies — including the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the U.S. Marshals Service — have also fanned out across Washington. Masked federal agents have made arrests in neighborhoods across the city, set up traffic checkpoints to enforce laws against seatbelt violations or broken taillights, and torn down a protest banner, among other efforts.
On Friday, Washington’s attorney general sued the administration for appointing the head of the DEA as the city’s “emergency police commissioner.” The administration walked back the move but then issued a follow-up order that directed local police to “cooperate fully and completely with federal immigration authorities.”
In his first seven months in office, Trump has commanded the military to increasingly insert itself into civil and law enforcement functions within the United States. He has deployed around 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon. But the true number of personnel deployed may be markedly higher. U.S. Northern Command has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed around the country.
These federal forces have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Many more troops, like the National Guard forces deploying to the capital, are operating under so-called Title 32 status, meaning they are under state, rather than federal, control, unlike deployments in Los Angeles and across the southern border. With no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general, to the secretary of the Army, to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to the president.
Late last month, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states. The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states.
When he announced the D.C. deployment, Trump also threatened to carry out similar power grabs in numerous cities led by Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors. “If we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,” Trump said. “You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore. They’re so far gone,” he continued. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further.”
Homestead noted that governors from red states were now actively collaborating in Trump’s authoritarian overreach. “Republican governors are now voluntarily using federal tax dollars to militarize D.C. instead of addressing the needs of their constituents, who are some of the poorest in the country,” she said.
Experts say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the U.S. represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America. Critics warn that this might put the troops being deployed and their commanders at legal risk of prosecution down the line.
“Through his manufactured emergency, President Trump is engaging in dangerous political theater to expand his power and sow fear in our communities. Sending heavily armed federal agents and National Guard troops from hundreds of miles away into our nation’s capital is unnecessary, inflammatory, and puts people’s rights at high risk of being violated,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Governors need to understand that with each order, the Trump administration increases legal and ethical jeopardy for state troops being deployed. No matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution, including our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, due process, and safeguards against unlawful searches and seizures. If troops or federal agents violate our rights, they must be held accountable.”
On Monday, Trump seemed close to declaring victory in D.C., although his triumphant tale involved unnamed persons calling him “sir” — which has been identified as a key tell that Trump is lying. “We went from the most unsafe place anywhere to a place that now people, friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up, and they’re saying, ‘Sir, I want to thank you,’” Trump claimed. “‘My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years. And Washington, D.C., is safe. And you did that in four days.’”
Trump said the military would help to “liberate this City, scrape away the filth, and make it safe, clean, habitable and beautiful once more!” in a Truth Social post. State governors and National Guard officials have used similar but more moderate language.
“We stand ready to support our partners in the National Capital Region and contribute to the collective effort of making our nation’s capital a clean and safe environment,” said West Virginia Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Jim Seward in a statement. “The National Guard’s unique capabilities and preparedness make it an invaluable partner in this important undertaking.”
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson repeatedly emphasized that Guard members would be involved in “area beautification” during a press briefing last week. The defense official expressed exasperation at the comments. “I wish someone would have asked Kingsley when she said it,” said the official, noting that many people took it to mean that soldiers would be picking up trash. The Intercept then asked if it meant gardening. “I don’t imagine you’ll see them necessarily planting flowers, but it could be,” said the official, who offered that troops might also “do debris removal or something like that.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
