Polling suggests the American public thinks President Donald Trump’s current and future planned National Guard deployments are authoritarian overreach. Atlantic writer Marc Novicoff said they should also see it as a budget-buster.
“The National Guard’s mostly quiet walks through Washington, D.C., are expected to cost a little more than $200 million,” wrote Novicoff, “… 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.”
The deployment to Los Angeles, he said, cost another $118 million as of early September, according to the California National Guard, and that number will grow as 100 troops remain in the city, long after the so-called 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,” said Novikoff. “Based on the known spending so far, the deployments could wind up costing Americans roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars.”
Even while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to lead the military into a new era of “waste-free clarity,” Novikoff said the funds for the Guardsmen’s wages, food, and travel must come from the Defense Department.
While it’s true that Washington, D.C. reports a decline in violent crime since troops’ arrival, the numbers aren’t yet in on how much of that is attributed to the military.
“In D.C., they are usually stationed in heavily touristed areas rather than in the city’s more violent Wards 7 and 8,” Novikoff said, adding that employing them in cities with preexisting drops in violent crime and murders makes little sense when places like Little Rock have a homicide rate that has grown “a horrifying 39 percent” in the first half of 2025.
What Washington, D.C., does have, however, is a police-officer shortage of about 800 cops, said Novikoff, and “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.”
The administration could fully fund the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which gives grants to departments across the country for staff. The program has been proven effective at reducing violent crime, said Novikoff, but the Trump administration proposed cutting 17 percent of the its budget, even though that budget costs a fraction of the price of the National Guard deployments.
“It is hard to think of a less efficient way of fighting crime 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,” Novikoff said. “So much for eliminating ‘waste.’”
Read the Atlantic report at this link.