OtherWords
Hanna Homestead
08/21/2025
President Trump mobilized the D.C. National Guard under the guise of restoring security in the nation’s capital — despite D.C.’s crime rate being at a 30-year low. What began as a deployment of 800 D.C. National Guard troops has grown to encompass 2,091 as of this writing, as Republican governors send hundreds more.
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The cost of this cruel power grab is borne by taxpayers like you and me.
Previous reporting found that National Guard deployments cost the U.S. government $530 per Guard member, per day. So the price tag of deploying 2,091 troops to D.C. is well over $1 million per day — and the number of troops will likely continue to grow. And with no deadline for the D.C. deployment, those costs could add up for months or even years.
This militarized spending comes at the expense of federal programs — like public housing — that actually do prevent crime and improve health and education outcomes.
Using those figures and other publicly available data, I calculated that the daily cost of operating public housing for all 5,616 people who are unhoused in D.C. on any given night is one-quarter the daily expense of deploying the National Guard. If the Guard remains deployed for three months, it would cost more than operating public housing for the entire unhoused population in D.C. for an entire year.
This is true for every community across the country — including the states whose GOP governors are voluntarily sending National Guardsmen to the capital. Across those six states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia — some 30,000 people are unhoused. The daily cost of operating safe shelter for all 30,000 would be less than one day of the D.C. occupation.
