What happened
President Donald Trump’s National Guard deployment to Washington, D.C., will cost the federal government another $1.4 billion through the end of his term in 2029, according to a Defense Department estimate for Congress obtained by news organizations Tuesday. The estimate “offers a glimpse of how much taxpayer money will be spent” on a deployment local officials call an “infringement of their city’s autonomy,” said The Associated Press.
Who said what
The White House “has not disclosed the full cost of the mission so far,” The Washington Post said, so the Pentagon’s new figure represents the “most comprehensive accounting yet” of Trump’s “unprecedented use of the military.” In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the deployment was costing about $55 million per month, or more than $700 million to date. “The National Guard are not pawns and taxpayer dollars are not a piggy bank for Trump’s political stunts,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement.
What next?
About 4,600 military personnel were stationed in D.C. as of last week, and the new estimate assumes that an average of 2,500 National Guard members will be there for the remainder of Trump’s term. But it’s unclear if governors will “extend their state units for more than two years,” said the AP.