A year into President Donald Trump’s unprecedented deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., some of the troops sent there say they are embarrassed by the mission and increasingly question why they are still there.
Three current National Guard members told NPR, speaking anonymously because they remain in service, that the deployment has left them frustrated and concerned about the military’s reputation.
“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way,” one said.
Another said the experience had made him reluctant to even identify with the Guard. “I don’t want to think about the National Guard. I don’t want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don’t want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission,” he said.
Trump first deployed hundreds of Guard members to the capital in August 2025, saying they were needed to help address crime after declaring a “crime emergency.”
The deployment has since been extended through the end of his term, making it his longest domestic military operation.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the current deployment costs about $3 million a day, while extending it through 2029 is expected to cost another $1.4 billion.
The troops interviewed by NPR said they quickly became skeptical of the mission’s purpose. One said that after a year, the administration’s original justification “holds” no water.
“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” the Guard member said. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”
Some troops said their duties initially involved little law enforcement at all. They cleared trash, bagged leaves, trimmed trees and handled logistical work around the National Mall.
“Walking into it, we had no real specifics,” one Guard member from West Virginia recalled. “The president is calling out the Guard to make D.C. safe. Well, what the what the f--- does that mean?”
Another said the mission eventually seemed less about fighting crime and more about maintaining a visible military presence.
“At some point, I found myself going, well, at least this isn’t that bad. At least I’m not doing anything illegal, and that’s always counterbalanced with, like, this is wasting everyone’s time,” the member said, adding that it became clear the “point of the mission is presence.”
The deployment has also carried a deadly cost. In November, a gunman shot two West Virginia Guard members near the White House, killing 20-year-old Spc. Sarah Beckstrom. The White House responded by sending hundreds more troops to Washington.
“I remember feeling just really sad,” one Guard member said. “And I kept thinking—did they have to be here?”
Another said Beckstrom’s death made the mission emotionally impossible for him to accept.
“The thing that really stuck out to me was how absolutely futile that death felt, and that was hard to live with,” he said. “After her death, this mission became untenable for me emotionally.”
The troops also described a growing backlash from Washington residents, including signs telling Guard members to go home. One said the deployment was damaging an institution traditionally associated with helping communities after disasters.
“If we continue down this path, where this kind of ‘presence patrol’ mission becomes the new definitive image of the National Guard, it’s going to completely rebrand everything that was noble about the National Guard into being mundane at best and threatening at worst,” one member said.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the National Guard for comment.
The criticism comes as outside analysis has questioned whether the deployments have reduced violent crime. The Center for American Progress (CAP) said earlier this month that the administration’s urban crime crackdown had cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion while finding no measurable effect on violent crime following Guard deployments.
“What we find is that across multiple cities, multiple data sets, and multiple time windows, we find no effect that violent crime actually did change post the National Guard deployments in any of the cities,” Chandler Hall, the associate director for public safety at CAP, told C-SPAN.
Trump has rejected that assessment and attacked CAP’s research.
“Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had ‘NO impact on Crime.’ How crazy is that,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics.”
CAP said it stood by its findings, accusing Trump of trying to silence independent research.
“When politicians can’t defend their failed policies with facts, they resort to intimidation. Trump is lashing out and threatening bogus lawsuits because he wants to silence independent research, waste taxpayer money on his failed agenda, and distract from the reality that his policies are hurting the American people,” a spokesperson previously told the Daily Beast.
