The Justice Department fired back at the D.C. Council's attempt to force National Guard troops out of Washington, calling the effort "impotent theatrics" and telling the council it lacks any authority to make such demands.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald sent a letter to the Council of the District of Columbia on Wednesday rebuking the panel for writing to ten state governors and asking them to pull their National Guard members out of the nation's capital. McDonald made the administration's position plain: the council holds "no power" to demand the removal of troops deployed under federal authority, and its letters amounted to nothing more than a political stunt. The Washington Examiner reported that the DOJ published the letter on the department's official X account.
The letter landed after the D.C. Council contacted governors in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia, all states whose Guard units are currently serving in D.C., and urged them to bring their troops home. McDonald responded not only with the rebuke but with letters of gratitude to those same governors, Just The News reported, thanking them for their contributions to public safety in the capital.
McDonald did not hold back. In the letter, he described the council's move as politically motivated and legally toothless. One passage stood out for its bluntness:
"Your politically motivated letter is impotent theatrics not worth the paper it's written on."
He went further, telling council members to redirect their energy toward fixing D.C.'s own criminal justice policies rather than obstructing federal law enforcement efforts:
"You should withdraw your letters and dedicate your remaining time in public service to correcting D.C. laws to ensure criminals are punished, and the public is protected, not the other way around."
That line, "not the other way around", captures the administration's core complaint: that D.C.'s local leadership has prioritized leniency over public safety, and that the consequences fell on the city's residents.
McDonald's letter laid out the administration's case for keeping the Guard in place. He pointed to a dramatic decline in violent crime that he tied directly to the military deployment. The Trump administration has consistently faced institutional resistance to its law enforcement agenda, but in D.C., it argues the results speak for themselves.
"Directly coinciding with the assistance of the National Guard, the murder rate dropped substantially. To date, D.C. has seen the largest reduction in violent crime in the history of the city. You might pretend violent crime isn't down in D.C. or act like the cause is unknown, but the public knows the city is safer."
The White House said Monday that more than 16,000 arrests have been made in D.C. as part of Trump's anti-crime campaign. As of August 4, more than 4,600 military personnel from roughly two dozen states were deployed across the district.
McDonald described the conditions that preceded the deployment in stark terms. Before the Guard arrived, he wrote, "violence became an epidemic in D.C., with residents and visitors facing almost unbelievable homicide rates."
"Murder became commonplace and tragically expected. At the same time, carjackings and other violent crimes also skyrocketed in D.C., and there is substantial reason to believe that crime was being undercounted."
That last claim, that crime was being undercounted, carries particular weight. The D.C. Police Union has conducted an investigation into concerns that top Metropolitan Police Department officials manipulated crime statistics to make the department look better than its actual performance warranted.
Beyond the arrest numbers, McDonald catalogued specific contributions the National Guard has made on D.C. streets. Task force members working alongside Guard units have located lost and missing children and taken "substantial numbers of illegal firearms off the city streets," he wrote.
"The National Guard has personally intervened in numerous assaults and provided medical aid on innumerable occasions, including repeatedly administering life-saving Narcan to citizens in peril."
Those are not the activities of an occupying force. They are the activities of first responders filling a gap that D.C.'s own government failed to close. The Metropolitan Police Department is short roughly 900 officers of the 4,000 it needs, a staffing level described as a 50-year low. The administration has framed the Guard deployment as a necessary response to that shortfall, not a political exercise.
The Trump administration has shown a willingness to push its enforcement priorities through every available legal channel, whether the issue is election integrity at the Supreme Court or crime in the streets of the capital. The D.C. deployment is among the most visible of those efforts.
The legal foundation for the deployment rests on Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the federal law that governs the relationship between D.C.'s local government and the federal government. President Trump invoked Section 740 on August 11, 2025, citing "special conditions of an emergency nature" to deploy the National Guard and place the Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.
That provision exists precisely because Washington, D.C., is not a state. It is a federal district, and its governance ultimately answers to federal authority. The D.C. Council may pass resolutions and write letters, but it cannot override a presidential invocation of the Home Rule Act. McDonald's letter made that constitutional reality explicit.
The deployment is set to continue until the end of Trump's second term in January 2029. That timeline signals the administration views the crime emergency as a long-term problem requiring sustained federal intervention, not a short-term political gesture.
Broader questions about the limits of federal authority continue to surface across the Trump administration's agenda. A recent federal court ruling striking down state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants illustrated the same dynamic: local governments making policy choices that the federal government views as undermining public interest, and federal power stepping in to correct course.
What the D.C. Council did not do is as telling as what it did. The council did not propose a plan to hire the 900 officers MPD needs. It did not offer an alternative strategy for addressing the violent crime that prompted the deployment. It did not explain how removing 4,600 Guard troops from the district would make residents safer. It wrote letters to governors.
McDonald's response suggested the council's priorities are misaligned with the interests of the people it represents. Residents who lived through the spike in homicides and carjackings are now living in a city that, by the administration's account, has seen a historic drop in violent crime. The council's answer to that improvement was to try to end it.
The administration has faced similar pushback on other fronts, including election integrity measures that critics call overreach but supporters view as basic accountability. In each case, the pattern is the same: the administration acts, institutions resist, and the public is left to judge whose priorities better serve their interests.
No public responses from D.C. Council members or from the ten governors who received the council's letters were included in the available reporting.
When a city council's best move is to beg other states to withdraw the reinforcements keeping its own residents safe, the problem is not the troops. The problem is the leadership that made them necessary.