The estimate, provided to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, covers the period from Oct. 1, 2026, through the end of the president’s term.
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The Pentagon’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., is set to cost an additional $1.4 billion through the end of the Trump administration, according to information provided to Congress and reviewed by The Washington Post.
The estimate, which encompasses October 2026 through January 2029, adds to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the mission to date. While the administration has not disclosed the full cost of the mission so far, the new figure represents the most comprehensive accounting yet of the president’s unprecedented use of the military to patrol the nation’s capital — an operation fiercely criticized by many Democrats and civil liberty advocates.
The information was provided to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, by Jules Hurst III, Trump’s nominee to become the Pentagon’s comptroller, as part of his confirmation process. Hurst is set to be confirmed in a bloc of Trump administration nominees as soon as this week.
The administration deployed National Guard personnel to Washington in August 2025, after Edward Coristine, a former staffer in Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service initiative to slash the federal government, was assaulted in an attempted carjacking. The National Guard will maintain a presence in D.C. until January 2029 or “until the president says the mission is over,” Brig. Gen. Leland Blanchard II, the interim commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, told reporters in a news briefing Monday.
The cost estimate provided to Warren assumes a deployment of about 2,500 National Guard personnel. There are approximately 4,600 service members in the city now, Blanchard said, part of a temporary surge coinciding with summer events to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Democrats have called the deployment a wasteful use of military resources and an infringement on Americans’ civil liberties, and they have pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to justify the mission as the Pentagon faces urgent budget shortfalls because of the Iran war and other military operations.
“The National Guard are not pawns and taxpayer dollars are not a piggy bank for Trump’s political stunts,” Warren said in a statement.
In testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Hegseth acknowledged the Defense Department is facing financial pressure but repeatedly blamed the situation on the Biden administration’s management of the military.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since returning to office, Trump has deployed active-duty and National Guard units to American cities on controversial missions to stop crime or protect federal immigration agents. Academics and researchers who specialize in politicization and the military, along with local officials in some of the targeted communities, have argued that the operations violate laws barring the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement.
Some state and local governments, including Washington, have challenged the deployments in court.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in January that the administration’s National Guard deployment in Washington cost $223 million through the end of 2025. It said deployments in Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, together cost an additional $273 million in 2025.
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CBO has estimated that each additional month of deployment in Washington would cost about $55 million.
Trump’s record $1.5 trillion defense budget request for fiscal 2027 includes $2.3 billion in funding for domestic use of the military, including $605 million for the National Guard mission in Washington.
In a separate request to Congress for $67 billion in additional funding to help cover the costs of the Iran war, the Trump administration also requested $800 million for the National Guard. Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat, said during last month’s hearing with Hegseth that those funds would go toward extending the D.C. deployment.
Blanchard, the National Guard general, defended the mission, noting that last month the Trump administration signed a $292 million contract to move National Guard members into local apartments from hotels in and around Washington. The move, Blanchard said, will save $90 million on lodging and transportation costs over the course of the contract.
He said, too, that service members have responded to about 800 medical emergencies — performing CPR and applying tourniquets on gunshot victims, and administering 325 doses of Narcan, a drug used to treat overdoses.
While Trump officials have repeatedly asserted the National Guard was necessary to help address a crime emergency in the city, D.C. police data shows violent crimes this year have remained about the same from this time in 2025. Property crimes, including burglary from cars and motor vehicle theft, have decreased by about a quarter. When the National Guard was deployed last year, crime rates were near a six-year low, according to federal data.
National Guard personnel in Washington are supposed to yield to local police for law enforcement activities, such as arrests, said Michael Perloff, the senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s D.C. chapter. But their orders leave open gray areas, including how personnel should respond in an emergency or when under threat, he said.
“National Guard members aren’t trained to handle those situations,” said Perloff, whose organization is challenging the mission’s legality in court.
The service members deployed in D.C. have been tasked with a variety of missions, such as guarding the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial and cleaning up garbage on city streets.
In November, two National Guard personnel were shot while patrolling the city blocks away from the White House. One died from her injuries.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national charged in the shooting, pleaded not guilty in June. He is facing a possible death sentence if convicted.
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