Letters from an American – August 27, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 27, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 27, 2025

The image of National Guard troops, some of them from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi, in Washington, D.C., spreading mulch around the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin and picking up trash, illustrates that President Donald J. Trump’s insistence that he needed troops to crack down on violent crime in the nation’s capital was always a cover for an authoritarian takeover.

As Kate Riga and Emine Yücel noted in Talking Points Memo today, earlier this spring Trump and congressional Republicans did all they could to weaken Washington, D.C. In March, Congress passed a resolution to fund the government temporarily while also freezing all federal spending. That included the District of Columbia, whose budget has to be approved by Congress although the monies involved come from local taxes, not federal funds.

Because those budget monies are local and not federal, according to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, the Washington, D.C., budget is routinely exempted from federal spending freezes. But the House did not carve it out this time, leaving the city with a shortfall of $1.1 billion. The Senate unanimously approved a bill to fix the error, letting the city continue to operate under its current budget, but the House never took it up. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser and local officials found a workaround to restore some funding but have had to freeze hiring and cut contracts, grants, and expenditures across the city’s agencies.

Cuts to city services have made it easier for Trump and his loyalists to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, although violent crime is dropping there, not rising, and the Department of Justice’s own numbers show it is at a 30-year low. Now, with troops stationed in the city, Trump and his MAGA loyalists are demonstrating that they control the federal capital.

Today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the administration will also take over Union Station in Washington, D.C., from which Amtrak and the city’s commuter rail lines run, saying such a takeover was part of Trump’s “beautification” program.

Amtrak took control of the station in July 2024, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of the Biden era provided $22 billion to Amtrak to modernize trains and stations. The administration cut a $120 million federal grant to Amtrak in April. Taking control of Union Station will put the administration in charge of key transportation lines into and out of the city. It also will create a federal presence in an area where veterans have been protesting.

The freezing of D.C.’s budget is a different process from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made across the federal government, although the effects of the two are similar. As Tara Copp of the Washington Post noted today, custodial work like that being done by the National Guard troops normally would have been performed by National Park Service employees. But that service was already short staffed when the administration slashed through the federal workforce. The park service used to have 200 people assigned to the thousands of acres of gardens and trees in the capital. Now it has 20.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 27, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson