The National Guard will stay deployed on the streets of Washington, D.C., through Inauguration Day 2029, the Pentagon confirmed to NPR, unless Trump decides otherwise. What began as an emergency is now scheduled to outlast the presidency that declared it.
Trump first sent the Guard into the capital in August 2025 after declaring a “crime emergency,” though violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low. The deployment has since roughly doubled to nearly 5,000 troops drawn from more than 20 states as part of a “summer surge” announced in May. The Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at more than $3 million per day.
The legal contradiction is the story. Emergency powers exist for emergencies; scheduling one to run two and a half more years concedes it is not one. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice: announcing that an emergency will last another two and a half years means it is not an emergency. The practical case is also thin: a study by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center found the deployment cut opportunistic offenses like auto theft and larceny by about 24 percent but had no measurable effect on violent crime, the stated justification.
A sitting president keeping troops garrisoned in the capital through the next election and up to the next inauguration, at a cost of roughly a billion dollars a year, normalizes a militarized capital as the background condition of American politics (see Trump Deploys ICE to 14 Airports and Threatens to Send the National Guard, as Agents Are Photographed Sipping Starbucks While Unpaid TSA Workers Screen Passengers).
Update (October 12, 2026): after images circulated on October 8 of Guard troops standing beside a ballot drop box in Foggy Bottom, before the boxes opened for use, the D.C. Board of Elections said it had “requested that they impose limitations on the placement of National Guard service members near drop boxes and other voting locations in the District.” The joint task force said its service members “are directed not to monitor or secure polling locations” and that it was “actively addressing this specific instance,” and two Guard officials told the Washington Post the troops were not trying to guard the box.