Category: Wires

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 President Donald Trump’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., Mass.), 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, Ore., together cost an additional $273 million in 2025.

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 (Wash.), 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.

The Department of Homeland Security has begun summoning Haitian immigrants in Ohio to check-in appointments with federal officers who are outfitting them with ankle monitors, in what appears to be a new enforcement effort after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end their humanitarian protections.

Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said about 50 Haitians with temporary protected status in Springfield, Ohio, were called into Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices on Friday. Local attorneys said the immigrants were arrested and then conditionally released with electronic monitoring devices. They were instructed not to travel anywhere outside a 75-mile radius from their homes.

A Trump administration official confirmed the effort to call Haitians with temporary protected status into ICE offices, give them ankle monitors, and release them. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal ICE operations, expected the check-ins to be scheduled in waves.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the Trump administration could end temporary protections for about 350,000 Haitians, despite ongoing political instability and gang violence in the Caribbean nation. DHS alerted employers last week that it had officially ended temporary protected status for Haitians, triggering mass layoffs and confusion because a lower court that had blocked the administration’s attempts to terminate the program has not yet lifted the order keeping TPS benefits in effect.

Congress created temporary protected status in 1990 to shield immigrants in the United States from being deported to countries engulfed in armed conflict, a natural disaster, or another extraordinary crisis, allowing them to work legally in the U.S. for up to 18 months. Applicants to the program cannot have serious criminal records, and they must pay fees and pass a background check. DHS can renew the protections — and it has, multiple times, for several countries.

Advocates and immigration attorneys said the new arrests in Ohio reflect ICE’s attempts to more quietly carry out President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Rather than large-scale operations like the ones DHS conducted in Minneapolis and Chicago, the agency has been focusing on arrests that take place after traffic stops and ICE check-ins. Arrests rose significantly in July.

“Rather than showing up with a militarized force in a particular neighborhood in Springfield and having communities be able to organize around that, this is calling people into a very secure facility,” said Erik Crew, a senior attorney at the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a California-based advocacy organization. “Yes, people can protest outside, but sometimes people can go in and never come out and be sent to a detention center somewhere remote, likely in the South, and be sent out of the country from there.”

A DHS spokesperson said the agency does not discuss “ongoing or future” operations but conducts enforcement daily.

“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that — temporary. For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent,” DHS said in a statement. “What we would say now is it’s closing time which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Many of the Haitians outfitted with ankle monitors in recent days have ongoing asylum claims and no final order of deportation, their attorneys said. Historically, the agency has deployed the worn devices on a case-by-case basis, but immigration attorney Carolyn Marks, who accompanied two Haitian clients to appointments with ICE on Sunday, said they are now being used more broadly.

“In the past, they have been used with people who have criminal records or had missed court hearings or an order of deportation,” Marks said. “But all these people had been and are complying with the law.”

Trump has long stated that he intended to target Haitian immigrants as part of his mass deportation drive. During his campaign, he falsely claimed that Haitian residents in Springfield were killing and eating their neighbors’ pets. After the Supreme Court ruling was announced, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters that Haitians and others with temporary protected status should be detained and deported once they lose the benefit.

Sens. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate TPS in a call with reporters on Monday. Both senators said the cancellations were not only putting families in danger but pulling thousands of needed workers out of the labor force.

“This is an embarrassment for the United States of America,” Murphy said. “There is no safe place to return for TPS holders from places like Haiti and Yemen and Venezuela and Syria. In fact, in those places I just mentioned, the situation is not stabilizing, getting better. It is getting worse.”

Katie Kersh, managing attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, a nonprofit based in Ohio that is providing legal representation to Haitian immigrants in the area, said ICE officers asked people who went to the check-ins over the weekend for biographical information and collected their fingerprints. She and other attorneys said the officers encouraged the immigrants to leave voluntarily and noted the $2,600 financial incentive DHS is offering those who choose to self-deport.

Kersh said one of her clients is a woman in her 60s who may miss the birth of her grandchild in Indiana as a result of the travel restrictions. She is a diabetic and worried that having the device strapped tightly to her ankle would cause pain. She inquired about an alternative, which ICE does sometimes provide, but was not offered one.

“ICE is setting up circumstances that makes it easier to detain them,” Kersh said.

Vilés Dorsainvil, who runs the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, stood outside an ICE office near Cincinnati as people reported for appointments. He said he asked ICE officers if the devices were necessary and was told that the “the order came from the top,” referring to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

DHS stated online last week that temporary protected status for Haitians was “terminated, effective July 27, 2026.” But lawyers say that TPS cannot officially end until lower courts execute a Supreme Court ruling and officially allow the Trump administration to terminate the program, which was first established for Haiti in response to the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in that country.

A DHS spokesperson disagreed, saying, “These activist lower court judges are openly defying the Supreme Court on this, but the end result will be the same. Haitians with TPS cannot and will not be able to stay.”

Jessica Bansal, an attorney focused on TPS litigation with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that “for all practical intents and purposes, there is no longer any protection.”

Ruby Powers, a Houston immigration attorney who represented clients from Venezuela who lost TPS after the administration canceled it for those immigrants, said ankle monitors and more frequent ICE check-ins are a means of pressuring people to leave.

“It’s the government’s way of signaling, ‘We know where you are, we are monitoring you closely, and we have the ability to detain you at any time,’” she said.

Marks, the immigration attorney, said that whatever might happen next will change her community.

“It’s going to be a very destabilizing event for Springfield,” she said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding the largest known cyclospora outbreak to 15 states, adding six states where illnesses have been traced to shredded iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, according to three individuals familiar with the investigation.

Missouri, which is reporting 1,095 cases, is one of the states being added, according to a state health department spokesperson. The number of state cases jumped dramatically in the past week. Patients who were interviewed at length by state and local investigators said they consumed Taco Bell before getting sick, spokesperson Lisa Cox said.

Information was not immediately available about the five other states. The individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The expansion marks a significant widening of the outbreak. On Monday, Michigan health officials announced that two people have died in the cyclospora outbreak there, the first deaths confirmed in the United States related to the microscopic parasite. Both people had underlying health conditions that may have been affected by the intestinal illness and dehydration.

On July 24, federal officials had linked illnesses in nine states to the outbreak. The CDC has said epidemiological and trace-back data continues to show that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico was contaminated with the parasite that has made people sick.

The newly linked states join Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

Taylor Farms recalled shredded iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico on July 17 after investigators linked the product to illnesses among people who had eaten at Taco Bell. The company said the lettuce was distributed from June 29 through July 16 through food-service channels and retail stores in 27 states.

Federal investigators so far have publicly linked illnesses to only a portion of the states where the company said the recalled lettuce was distributed. Federal officials are also investigating outbreaks and illness in more than two dozen states that have not been linked to the 15-state outbreak. The sources of other outbreaks have not been identified or tied to Taylor Farms.

Taylor Farms has declined to provide additional details, including how many pounds of product were covered by the recall and where shredded lettuce was distributed before June 29. A Taylor Farms spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During foodborne-illness outbreaks, the CDC is charged with trying to identify the food sickening Americans, relying on labor-intensive disease detective work that includes detailed interviews with people about what they ate, where they ate it, and when. The Food and Drug Administration works to determine who produced the contaminated food and works with food companies to stop it from being sold. The FDA also tries to identify how the food may have become contaminated.

The new cases being reported don’t necessarily mean the risk is still ongoing, experts have said. The true number of sick people in the multistate outbreak is probably higher than the number reported, and the outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses, the CDC has said.

The incubation period is long, and some people recover without medical care and are not tested for cyclospora. Recent illnesses may not yet be reported because it can take as long as six weeks to determine if a sick person is part of an outbreak.

“We’re always trying to figure out what is the risk today of going and eating a salad, for example,” said Craig Hedberg, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s division of environmental health sciences.

President Donald Trump has directed contractors to redo weeks of work on his planned White House helipad, frustrated with its appearance and questioning whether the slope of the White House lawn needs to be changed, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his private comments.

Trump has made the helipad a priority, ordering that work begun in June be completed by a state visit in September, but was dissatisfied with the results, the people said. The White House’s South Lawn, where the helipad is being built, slants downward. Trump has expressed a desire for a landing pad that sits level with the horizon, prompting contractors to disassemble their work and consider whether to start by changing the lawn itself, the people said.

Photographs obtained by the Washington Post on Tuesday show how contractors have taken apart their work, including a 100-foot-wide granite presidential seal that was beginning to take shape last week.

Construction crews having been working around the clock on the project, which Trump hopes will wrap up before Chinese President Xi Jinping visits in late September, the Post reported last month.

It was unclear how much additional cost or time the latest changes would add to the $5 million-plus project, which is being paid for by Lockheed Martin. It owns the company that manufactures the helicopters.

Lockheed Martin did not immediately respond to a question on Tuesday about whether it had been asked to cover any additional costs. Clark Construction, the firm that is working on the project, referred questions to the White House, which did not comment on the president’s specific changes.

“For years, the White House has desperately needed a proper Helipad on White House grounds that will allow the President to land safely and also protect the beautiful South Lawn grass from the fierce exhaust fumes of the incredible Marine One,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement. “Thanks to President Trump, the White House has never looked better, and it will only continue to get better under his leadership.”

Helipads should be flat for safety but do not need to be perfectly horizontal, to ensure water runoff, according to federal recommendations. The South Lawn, used for decades by helicopters that transport the president, slopes downward about 20 degrees in some places, the White House has previously said. That exceeds the recommended slant for helipads. The area chosen for the new helipad is flatter than other places.

The helipad will be near the South Portico, the traditional landing site for Marine One, the call sign for whichever helicopter is being used for the president. The project is intended to address a long-running problem: The new generation of Marine One helicopters runs the risk of burning the lawn.

The VH-92A Patriot, manufactured by Sikorsky Aircraft, has exhaust vents that aim heat down, making grass-scorching likely. Sikorsky, which is owned by Lockheed Martin, spent years working with administration officials to find a solution before Trump approved the planned helipad.

In the meantime, Trump is using the Ellipse — a park south of the White House — as a temporary landing zone for Marine One.

LONDON — When President Donald Trump strode into the Rose Garden in April 2025 brandishing a poster board of tariff hikes, the world leaped as if a fire alarm had gone off. Markets shed trillions of dollars, envoys rushed to Washington, and more than 75 governments scrambled to negotiate, some scrapping carefully prepped countermeasures in a rush to cut deals.

Sixteen months later, the flabbergasting threats keep piling up — to weaponize trade, annex Canada, seize Greenland, abandon NATO, annihilate Iran — but the alarm bells have gone quiet. World leaders are slower to rattle as they’ve seen the president increasingly fenced in by courts, rebuffed by Congress, and strung along by Tehran — his ultimatums evaporating and poll numbers sinking.

When Trump announced a fresh barrage of tariffs last month, this time based on accusations of child labor violations to skirt limits imposed by the Supreme Court, the world didn’t shriek — it shrugged. France’s central bank governor predicted little impact. Britain proclaimed its exporters largely unaffected. Mexico’s economy minister waved it off as one tariff simply replacing another.

The financial markets, inured to the bluster, hardly moved.

As Trump nears the midpoint of his second term, officials and analysts say, one of his signature powers — to bluster on social media, shock, spark panic, and convert that panic (“thank you for your attention to this matter”) into the outcomes that he wants, has begun to fade. The bully pulpit of the presidency remains, but the audience is no longer quaking in the pews.

“We are getting used to these daily announcements,” said Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament who chairs its delegation for relations with the United States. “We don’t take them so seriously anymore.”

At home, Trump continues to dominate the national conversation and drive the policy agenda. Still, the president was unable to muscle the Republican-controlled Senate into leaving the Epstein files under seal or passing his signature Save America Act. This week, he had to make concessions to get his nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general back on track.

Abroad, most consequently, Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.

For a world weary of the United States’ capacity to disrupt, the bombast is baked in, the threats are frequently bluffs, and the president who relishes shock and awe, in the end, often backs down.

The stock trader’s refrain of “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out — has begun to take hold in more world capitals, said Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

“I’ve been a little surprised at how much his bluster has worked until now,” Shapiro said of the bravado that rattled the world at the start of Trump’s second term. It was effective, he said, because it drew on the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” — reserves, he said, that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

Officials “are starting to notice that he’s kind of a bully, and is quite easy to scare,” Shapiro said.

Last year’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were hollowed out within days by carve-outs and delays. The steep levies he threatened against European allies over Greenland were withdrawn in Davos, Switzerland, in January for a vague “framework” that Denmark never accepted and has yielded no major change.

China met his threat of 100% tariffs by refusing to blink, then used its chokehold on rare-earth minerals and a halt on U.S. soybean purchases to force Washington into a climbdown — a lesson in how standing tough often causes Trump to bend that other governments have also learned.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ignored a 50% tariff designed to derail the prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of charges related to fomenting an armed coup and sentenced to 27 years anyway.

Nowhere is the erosion of Trump’s bluster-power starker than in Iran, where the United States and Israeli initiated a bombing campaign that killed the country’s supreme leader and other top officials but left the Islamic regime intact and with a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital conduit for global energy supplies and other cargo.

Trump issued a cascade of ultimatums demanding that Tehran reopen the strait, notably threatening to annihilate Iranian “civilization” if it refused. The strait stayed shut. Iran did not fold, even under existential threat, and Trump quietly shifted his stated goals on regime change and on Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.

“Between threats, then bombing, then backing off, what he’s radiating to the Iranians is that he’s desperate,” said Ronald E. Neumann, a career Foreign Service officer and U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Algeria under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “As experienced bargainers, that means you don’t have to lower the price.” Neumann also put it less diplomatically: “The way Trump bargains,” he said, “I wouldn’t give him money to go to the carpet bazaar.”

Trump’s browbeating also failed to pull European countries into his Iran campaign. He threatened Spain with a total trade embargo after it refused assistance, leaned on Britain, France, and Germany to reimpose U.N. sanctions, and hinted he might not honor America’s NATO obligations. But those allies refused to get more deeply involved the war — and some countries, namely Spain and Italy, have closed their bases or airspace to it.

When Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain, said one EU diplomat, officials seemed more inclined to dismiss the comments as rhetorical bluster, with many having learned from experience that his outburst would fizzle if ignored. But this diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate relations, conceded that Trump’s unpredictability made such calculations difficult.

“It can be tricky,” the diplomat said, citing Trump’s military operations against Iran. “He doesn’t always chicken out.”

To be sure, Trump has shown he is willing pull the trigger.

To the surprise of his America First base that expected retrenchment, not adventurism, he has deployed the U.S. military more aggressively abroad than any recent president — seizing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in a January raid by Special Operations forces, bombing Tehran a month later, and ordering dozens of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats across the Caribbean and Pacific.

At home, he sent National Guard troops on patrol in Washington, D.C., and his immigration crackdown has thrown American cities into turmoil, with masked federal agents sweeping workplaces and courthouses — raids that sometimes turned deadly and ignited protests.

But even the willingness to use force has not bought the deference it once did. Increasingly, officials and politicians at home and abroad are willing to challenge Trump’s threats — or ignore them.

“Europe is noticeably less prone to panic,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group consultancy. “European governments are increasingly distinguishing between Trump’s rhetoric … and the policies that ultimately emerge.”

The pattern reaches into the Gulf, where officials have grown inured to Trump’s style of deal making, analysts said.

Last month, Washington and Riyadh announced an agreement on Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program only for Trump to post later on Truth Social that the deal was contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.

Saudi officials found the claim surprising and annoying given that they had already trumpeted the agreement across their own channels, said Andrew Leber, a Middle East scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington-based policy institute.

“At this point, they have dealt enough with Trump deals to know that such exasperating and inconsistent moves have become the norm,” Leber said.

For much of Trump’s first year back, European capitals ran the same strategy of flattery and appeasement they believed had contained him before. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Trump’s Scottish golf resort to settle a trade fight on his terms. Britain invited him for an unprecedented second state visit.

Leaders now are still willing to flatter Trump, especially in private, but they are less willing to offer the concessions he wants, according to a European diplomat who has been involved directly in talks with the administration.

“Behind closed doors they are still putting it on thick because they know it works,” said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive interactions. “This is a president who can significantly soften his position in the course of a single meeting. But that doesn’t mean you give in. That is true more than ever.”

Greenland was a turning point, the diplomat said, because Trump’s threats evaporated against united European opposition. China, too, showed that pushing back could bend the president, as did Brazil, whereas Europe’s surrender to Trump’s initial trade barrage merely led to further demands from him.

“I think people are saying, well, we don’t want to provoke him unnecessarily, but we can’t really make him happy,” said Neumann, the former ambassador.

Learning to mute Trump’s threats won’t necessarily make the rest of his term easier to navigate, analysts said. Doing so could even make things less predictable if Republicans lose one or both of their majorities in Congress in the midterm elections and Trump turns to more unilateral executive actions.

“It could be super dangerous,” Shapiro said. “Trump is not somebody who will go quietly into the night. He will rage about his loss of capacity and he will look for other ways to take risks with American power.”