The soldiers the president sent to his own capital to make it safe are now the ones telling the country they do not want to be there.

"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."

— Current National Guard member, speaking to NPR on the condition of anonymity because he remains in service

One year into what is the longest domestic military operation of Donald Trump's presidency, the men and women on the ground are having a crisis of conscience. Three current National Guard members told NPR that the deployment to Washington, D.C. has left them frustrated, humiliated, and quietly disavowing the very institution they serve. The president ordered them in to fight a "crime emergency." They are telling reporters, in their own words, that the emergency was never real, and that what replaced it is something they did not sign up to be part of.

The deployment began in August 2025, after Trump declared D.C. a crime emergency and sent hundreds of Guard members into the capital. It has since been extended through the end of his term, which makes it, by any measure, his signature use of the military against his own domestic population. The troops are concentrated in touristy districts and transport hubs, the parts of the city where the presence photographs well and the actual work is nowhere to be seen.

The honest version of the mission is deflating. The members describe an operation that, for long stretches, involved almost no law enforcement at all. They cleared trash, bagged leaves, trimmed trees, and ran logistical tasks around the National Mall. One Guard member from West Virginia summed up the fog of the ordering chain with blunt language: "The president is calling out the Guard to make D.C. safe. Well, what the f--- does that mean?"

What he meant, the members said, became clear only over time. The point of the mission is presence. Not patrol, not prevention, presence. A soldier standing there so a camera, a resident, or a cable news crew can see a soldier standing there.

"It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense."

That is the whole thing, in one sentence from a service member. An institution that gets called up to fight hurricanes and wars is being asked to stand in a mall for a photograph, and a quarter of a trillion dollars of national prestige is quietly spent in the process.

The bill is enormous. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the current deployment runs about $3 million a day. Extending it through 2029 is expected to cost another $1.4 billion. Across the cities Trump targeted, the Center for American Progress put the total above $1.7 billion. For that money, the measurable result on the metric the deployment was sold on, violent crime, is effectively zero.

CAP's research, published in July and explained by associate director Chandler Hall on C-SPAN, looked at every city where the Guard was deployed, across multiple data sets and multiple time windows. "What we find," Hall said, "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." A separate report from the Niskanen Center reached the same conclusion, calling the crackdown "blunt and expensive."

The defense the administration reaches for is that crime was already falling, and the troops simply arrived in time to share the credit. Hall conceded, in the interest of fairness, that the visible military presence did cut opportunistic property crime, theft and vandalism, by roughly 24 percent in the areas it occupied. That is a real but narrow result. It means the deployment was effective at one thing: making people less likely to pick a phone off a table in front of a camera. It did not make the city safer in the way the order was written to promise.

Translation: the president spent a quarter of a billion dollars to make tourists feel watched, and then called the receipt a victory.

Trump's response to the findings was what it always is when a number arrives. He renamed the Center for American Progress "the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress," called its report "another Radical Left SCAM," listed a roster of funders from Soros to T-Mobile to the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, and announced he was "strongly considering" a lawsuit. CAP said it stands by the report and accused the White House of intimidation.

The president then turned to the people most qualified to defend the mission and found them unable to. What he did not hear from the Guard, because the Guard was not asked, is what the Guard told NPR this week: that they are ashamed. One member said the experience made him reluctant to even identify with the institution. "I don't want to think about the National Guard," he said. "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."

There is a death at the center of this. In November, a gunman shot two West Virginia Guard members near the White House and killed 20-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom. The White House response to her death was to send hundreds more troops into the city. The members described a wound that did not close. One said he kept asking a single question after the shooting: "did they have to be here?" Another said the death made the mission "untenable for me emotionally," because "how absolutely futile that death felt" was something he could not live with.

Beckstrom was sent to a crime emergency that did not exist, to stand in a presence mission, and she was killed doing a job that her own unit now describes as pointless. The arithmetic of that is the arithmetic of the whole deployment.

The troops also describe a growing local backlash, signs on the street telling them to go home, and a slow but visible rebranding of what the National Guard means to the public. "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 institution exists because the public believes it is called when a storm hits, not when a photograph needs to be good.

The president can keep the deployment running through the end of his term. He can keep the money flowing, about $3 million a day, into a wall of standing soldiers. He can keep renaming the think tanks and threatening lawsuits at the people who count the cost. He cannot, however, change the most dangerous development in this entire operation. The danger is not the troops. The danger is that the troops have decided, privately and in writing for a national broadcast, that the thing they are doing is not worth doing, and not worth dying for.

Beckstrom died for a mission her own unit now calls futile. That is the number that will outlast the receipts. The question is not whether the deployment worked. The question is whether an army whose members are embarrassed to say they serve in it can be the instrument of an order that is supposed to make a capital feel safe.

The president sent soldiers to his city to project strength. A year later, the strongest thing about the mission is the way it makes its own members feel. And right now, they feel the bad taste.