WASHINGTON – The National Guard will remain deployed in Washington, D.C.through Inauguration Day 2029 as part of President Trump's anti-crime mission in the city, unless the president deems otherwise, the Pentagon confirmed to NPR.The announcement comes as the number of troops in the city has essentially doubled to nearly 5,000 from more than 20 states in recent weeks, as part of a "summer surge" of law enforcement announced by federal officials in May.The current cost of the deployment is more than $3 million per day, according to an estimate by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.Trump first deployed the National Guard to D.C.
in August of 2025 — something the president can do because of the unique status of the city — after declaring a "crime emergency" and launching the D.C.Safe and Beautiful Task Force, despite violent crime hitting a 30-year low.
The emergency declaration ended a month later, but the task force and troop presence has continued.The result has been thousands of armed and uniformed National Guard members patrolling residential and business districts of the city for nearly a year, becoming a regular — and controversial — part of the D.C.scenery.
Trump has repeatedly touted the drop in crime in the city since, although those trends had started long before the task force was launched.Constitutional experts, former military officers and activists have all expressed concern that the continued presence of troops in the streets of the nation's capital is a worrying sign of the health of America's democracy."An emergency is a sudden, unforeseen, and temporary state of affairs.
Announcing that an emergency will last for another two and a half years means it's not an emergency," says Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of Liberty and National Security at the Brennan Center for Justice.She worries that at best, Trump is seeking to normalize the use of the military as a domestic police force, and at worst, he's envisioning a role for th...