One could describe President Donald Trump’s existing and planned National Guard deployments in a few different ways. The administration sees them as a necessary protection for federal law enforcement in dangerous times. Many Americans see them as authoritarian overreach.
Taxpayers should see them as incredibly expensive.
The National Guard’s mostly quiet walks through Washington, D.C., are expected to cost a little more than $200 million, USA Today reported, and that’s the figure just for the D.C. National Guard, not for the eight states that have sent troops. Those likely more than double that cost, because out-of-state troops make up a majority of the D.C. deployment. According to the California National Guard, the deployment to Los Angeles cost another $118 million as of early September, a number that continues to grow as 100 troops remain in the city, long after the precipitating unrest has died down. Tens of millions of dollars—perhaps hundreds of millions in total—will be spent on deployments to Chicago, Portland, and Memphis, if Trump’s plans for those cities proceed. Based on the known spending so far, the deployments could wind up costing Americans roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars.
These expenses would seem to undermine an administration that has claimed to go after “waste, fraud, and abuse” wherever possible. The funds for the Guardsmen’s wages, food, and travel come from the Defense Department. There, Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that he intends to lead the department into a new era of waste-free clarity. “For too long,” he recently told a meeting of generals and admirals flown in from around the world to hear him speak, “the military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things.” One of the right things, apparently, must be deploying troops to American cities, which the White House has presented, in large part, as an effort to reduce crime. But if that’s the goal, the method the administration has settled on is highly inefficient.
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It’s true that, at least in Washington, D.C., the deployment of the National Guard alongside hundreds of federal law-enforcement officers has been accompanied by a sharp decline in violent crime. Isolating the effect of the federal surge is impossible this early on, but during the first month of the deployment, homicides were down 53 percent and carjackings were down 75 percent relative to the same month last year. (Both categories were already declining.) Homicides have gone down even more in the second month of the deployment.
These positive trends are hardly surprising, however. America is underpoliced relative to other Western countries, and in general, adding more law-enforcement officers reduces crime. Cops are effective not merely through big busts or high-profile investigations, Adam Gelb, the president of the Council of Criminal Justice, told me. The presence of law enforcement also deters would-be criminals who’d prefer not to be caught and who know that’s all the more likely if a government agent is nearby. That might explain how the National Guard could have an effect on crime without even making any arrests, which they are instructed to avoid. Cleaning up public parks—a more mundane task that the Guard has taken on—doesn’t hurt either, signaling that the city is a well-run place with rules. For short-term crime reduction, increasing the certainty of being caught for a crime and reducing blight “would be on the top-five list of almost any criminologist,” Gelb said.
Of course, the Guardsmen have not necessarily been deployed where they could be most effective. In D.C., they are usually stationed in heavily touristed areas rather than in the city’s more violent Wards 7 and 8. A good crime-reduction strategy, Gelb said, would focus on “high-risk people in high-risk places.” And although D.C. and Memphis rank high for homicide rates among American cities, neither is No. 1; Chicago isn’t in the top 20, and Portland isn’t even close. Jeffrey Butts, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, told me, “If you wanted to go after cities that were in trouble and experiencing increases in homicide, for example, you would go to Little Rock,” where homicides are up a horrifying 39 percent in the first half of 2025, amid a downward national trend.
And even if re-mulching the District’s trees has a positive effect on crime rates, making the military do it is exceedingly expensive and inefficient, beyond any questions of appropriateness. Washington, D.C., has a police-officer shortage of about 800 cops. Filling every one of those positions would cost significantly less than $200 million; the total police budget is only $573 million. Memphis, a similarly sized city with dozens more homicides annually, has a smaller police-officer shortage that the White House could help them fill. Portland and Chicago are short on cops too.
[Read: Why is the National Guard in D.C.? Even they don’t know]
The administration has tools available to do just that, in the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which gives grants to departments across the country for staffing up. Since its establishment as part of the 1994 crime bill, the COPS office has funded well over 100,000 additional police hirings, and research on the program has concluded that it’s been effective at reducing violent crime. Yet, in its latest DOJ budget request, the Trump administration proposed cutting the program’s budget by $73 million (roughly 17 percent of the total COPS budget)—a fraction of the cost of the National Guard deployments.
One frequent critique of the COPS program has been that it cannot address more structural determinants of crime. That was evidently not the Trump administration’s concern in suggesting the funding cut: In April, the administration unilaterally cut more than $800 million in grants given out by the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs to organizations involved in community violence intervention, juvenile-justice and -protective services, substance-abuse and mental-health programs, research, and even law enforcement. Many of these programs tried to interrupt cycles of violence, rather than just deter or lock up people. Butts, who directs a crime-research center, told me, “They are worth the money we spend on them.” They’re defunded now. A tiny fraction of the grants were restored after the DOJ was informed by the media which programs it had actually cut, including pet-friendly domestic-violence shelters and victim hotlines.
The Trump administration says a primary goal of its National Guard deployments is to reduce crime. Taking that claim at face value—a dubious proposition—it is hard to think of a less efficient way of doing so than shifting funds away from violence prevention and local law enforcement and toward troops who stand in low-crime areas and don’t make arrests. So much for eliminating “waste.”
