DC residents debate safety gains a year into Trump's Guard deployment

Trump has often railed against DC, calling it "one of the most unsafe cities anywhere in the world" and claiming that since the Guard was brought in, crime has dropped by 88 percent. However, the precise impact of the National Guard's presence on crime in Washington, DC, remains unclear. Currently, 4,636 soldiers are deployed to the DC mission, including nearly 700 from the DC National Guard and thousands from various other state guards, according to a Joint Task Force-DC spokesperson. The largest out-of-state contributors are Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi. While no official cost has been reported for the first year of the operation, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security reported an annual estimate of $602m. In July, the Pentagon announced plans to keep the Guard in DC through the end of Trump's term. According to an estimate obtained by Senator Elizabeth Warren, the deployment will cost an additional $1.4bn from October 2026 to January 2029. The figure comes on top of an already steep deployment cost so far.