WASHINGTON — The Trump administration's deployment of the National Guard to the nation's capital has cost taxpayers more than $330 million and delivered little in the way of measurable results, according to a new report from Democrats on the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Andy Kim of New Jersey released the report Thursday as the National Guard's presence in Washington could continue through the rest of 2026. The senators said the deployment is on track to exceed $600 million at the one-year mark, in August.
“What’s interesting is that despite that significant investment of taxpayer dollars now six months into the mission, the National Guard has been unable to identify any specific measurable public safety outcomes directly attributable to their presence,” Peters, the top Democrat on the panel, told reporters on a media call.
The 14-page report characterizes the National Guard's presence as having a vague crime-fighting directive with an “unrealistic or unachievable outcome that would leave them in D.C. indefinitely.” It says a top National Guard commander told staff members that their mission is to help drive down metrics like violent crimes and drug overdoses so that they're nonexistent.
President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C. in an executive order in August and deployed the National Guard to the city. Within a month of his order, more than 2,300 National Guard troops from the district and eight states, including West Virginia, Georgia and Ohio, were patrolling the city’s streets.
Trump at the time called D.C. “one of the most dangerous cities” in the world, even though the Justice Department had reported that the crime rate in the city fell to a 30-year low in 2024.
The cost of the deployment, which the senators project will come to $602 million over 12 months, eclipses the entire D.C. police budget, with the deployment including nearly 2,500 National Guard members at any given time. The Metropolitan Police Department employs 4,900 officers, with an annual budget of less than $600 million.
Peters said the report's findings indicate that "the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this deployment have not been effective in making the district safer.”
“Instead, the mission has truly blurred the line between military and civilian law enforcement. It has weakened the guard’s readiness that’s diverted local law enforcement officers and federal civil servants from core responsibilities that they have,” he said.
Kim, who also spoke on the call, said, “This is something where we have to very much question whether or not this is worth the money when we’re getting half the number of people and people who are coming from other states that don’t know the area, don’t know the community, and that kind of challenge is something that makes them less effective in their job.”
While overall crime in Washington has gone down in the past year, the senators said they were unable to find any measurable data to show the National Guard’s presence in the city was a contributing factor.
Two National Guard members were shot — one of them fatally — near the White House in November while they were deployed to the district. The suspect in the shooting pleaded not guilty in federal court Wednesday.
The report lays out the senators’ findings after what they said was the Defense Department’s failure to respond to their questions about the deployment. They said their written requests for information were ignored, so they directed committee staff members to conduct oversight visits to the D.C. National Guard headquarters in September.
The D.C. National Guard did provide metrics about beautification efforts, including packing 6,030 pounds of food, painting 270 feet of fence and pruning 65 trees, but the report says Democrats were unable to find the cost of those operations, which were paused during the winter because of weather. The entire budget for the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation is $83.6 million, the report said.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration in November to end the deployment, finding that Trump’s actions illegally intrude on local officials’ authority to direct law enforcement. An appeals court overturned the ruling a month later, saying the deployment could continue for now, as the president “possesses a unique power” to mobilize the guard in a federal district.
Peters called the operation in D.C. costly, in more way than one.
“This is just a very expensive publicity stunt and very dangerous for our country, particularly if you want to try to normalize having people in military uniforms in our cities,” he said.
Frank Thorp V reported from Washington and Kyla Guilfoil from New York.
