Trump’s Occupation Could Cost Billions

Amid the shock and awe of occupation by armed National Guard troops with the mission of policing a city experiencing a 30-year low in violent crime, it’s been easy to overlook just how bloated and extravagant Donald Trump’s siege of Washington, DC, is proving to be. With 2,100 National Guard personnel now roaming the streets looking to hound detained residents into inflated federal charges to make Trump’s MAGA putsch a more effective exercise in propaganda of the deed, the authoritarian project is running up a price tage of more than $1 million a day, per Nick Turse’s report in The Intercept. Trump has already indicated that he plans to extend the siege beyond the 30-day time limit imposed under the section of the Home Rule law he initially invoked to justify the takeover. 

That means that the costs will continue ballooning—particularly under the president’s just-issued executive order calling for sweeping mobilizations of personnel and resources across the federal government in what he’s pleased to call the Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful initiative. Trump’s order calls for new hires at the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense (in its capacity as the agency administering the DC National Guard), and the US Park Police, while beefing up policing measures under the DC Transit Authority and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The order also calls for the establishment of an “online portal” for applicants with law enforcement backgrounds to join a new “specialized unit” devoted “to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”

This vast mobilization is a far cry from what Trump originally peddled as a quick fix to a bogus crime epidemic abetted by Democratic “incompetence.” The long-term costs of this massive security-state boondoggle are hard to gauge, with so many more arms of the government bulking up under its open-ended mandate, but there is one recent analogous authoritarian action to use as a rough measuring stick: the administration’s enormously wasteful and ineffective crackdown on protests of the immigration goon-squad tactics it employed in and around Los Angeles. That federal show of illegal military force lasted 60 days, and under a likely lowball estimate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ran up a $134 million price tag.

Compared to the DC action, which features the dual open-ended missions of law enforcement and upgrading the city’s infrastructure, the federal mobilization in LA was a targeted exercise—even though the exercise in question was baldly authoritarian and antidemocratic. To give some sense of Trump’s Mussolini-like ambitions for making DC his playground, he’s asked Congress for an additional $2 billion to spring for urban renovations alone. (Of course, Trump styles this a beautification plan, but any cursory look at his recent overhaul of the White House, and the plans for the $200 million ballroom he wants attached there reveals that designation as a category error.)

The administration is also overseeing other enormous DC-based projects to feed the Great Leader’s vanity, including a MAGA makeover of the Kennedy Center, with plans for it to host the 2026 World Cup draw in December. Trump lackeys are also supervising the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees the renovation of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters that has lately drawn Trump’s ire; Trump has sought in addition to use the agency’s authority over the planned $3.7 downtown stadium for the Commanders football team as blackmail bait to restore the team’s racist former moniker.

All of these big-ticket efforts to remake Washington into Trump’s Caligulan image are outlandish and undemocratic on their own terms, but one development makes them especially so: At the 11th hour of last spring’s deal to continue funding the government, Senate Republicans engaged in some accounting legerdemain to deprive the district of $1 billion in funds raised from taxpayers in the district. This act of looting left the city hard-pressed to meet the costs of basic services and income supports that, in any rational political order, are key elements of genuine public order. It is indeed testament to the city’s overall governing competence, pace Trump’s lies, that crime has not spiked under these steep and completely unjustifiable budget pressures.

To put things another way: Washington, which has already been reeling from the economic impact of the Trump administration’s parallel illegal and ideological sacking of the federal workforce, is now effectively subsidizing the conditions of its own daily MAGA oppression. And just as Chicago and New York appear to be next in line for the praetorian MAGA throttling debuted in LA and Washington, so will the rest of the country experience a version of DC’s beggaring as Trump’s massive spending bill transforms Medicaid and SNAP spending into tax cuts for the MAGA crony class. Trump called that boondoggle a beautification project too.