President Donald Trump’s agenda to make the federal government more “efficient” has been a farce. Despite using the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to enact sweeping cuts to social services, federal spending went up last year, not down. Now, new data allows us to put a price tag on one of Trump’s unique sources of financial waste last year: his authoritarian deployments of federal troops to six American cities.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, as the Associated Press reported, federal deployments of the National Guard and active-duty Marines cost $496 million in 2025. And continued deployment could cost more than $1 billion for the rest of the year. Each additional troop activation of 1,000 National Guard personnel would cost roughly $20 million per month.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted for no good reason.
While Trump relished making cuts to services for the elderly and the disabled under the banner of efficiency, he also spent half a billion dollars on troop deployments that served no function other than displaying his capacity to repress political opponents.
After 19-year-old Edward Coristine — a former DOGE employee also known as “Big Balls” — was assaulted in Washington, D.C., Trump claimed that the city needed National Guard troops to bring down out-of-control crime. In reality, D.C. was experiencing a 30-year low in violent crime. And while Trump claimed his deployment of National Guard troops brought down crime in D.C., The Trace, a publication focused on gun violence, found that declines in gun violence in D.C. last year were already well underway before the decline that took place under the deployment.
Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles was also based on a deceptive pretext — putting down protests against federal immigration operations that the state and city had more than enough resources to handle. Trump eventually removed troops from L.A. and other cities after a Supreme Court ruling in December that said Trump’s rationale was insufficient to legally justify deploying the National Guard to uphold the law. Now Trump might be looking for other routes to justify deployments in the future using the Insurrection Act.
And yet another sign that Trump’s pretext for sending troops into cities was purely political is that he focused on major, culturally influential blue cities and largely avoided ones with actual high crime rates.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted for no good reason. And that’s not factoring in the costs of his massive injection of funds into federal immigration enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now has some 14 times more funding than it did about 10 years ago — all toward the end of deporting a population that’s vital to the U.S.’ economic functioning.
Ultimately, though, far more concerning than the financial cost of Trump’s stagecraft are the costs for norms in civil-military relations. Trump is always looking to test the limits of the law and the American public’s willingness to put up with troops or other kinds of militarized state agents on their streets. And despite some setbacks, his appetite remains.
