The secretary of defense won’t confirm the time limits on Donald Trump’s capital takeover.
The president activated 800 National Guard members to Washington Monday. He also federalized the Metropolitan Police Department to rid the country’s capital of homeless people and to handle a nonexistent uptick in crime. To do so, Trump declared a “public safety emergency,” emphasizing Washington’s supposedly startling rise in crime while citing inflammatory statistics from 2023 instead of 2025.
Trump’s order, however, has an expiration date: the president has 30 days before his occupation of the Metropolitan Police requires congressional approval by way of a new law.
His time constraints on leveraging the D.C. National Guard are a bit more complicated: Trump’s repeated use of the National Guard brushes up against the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878 that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes. The trial challenging the legality of his decision to deploy the National Guard in June against Los Angeles protesters kicked off Monday in a California courtroom.
But it’s not clear if the Trump administration has any intention of respecting the law. In an interview with Fox News Monday evening, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to acknowledge the time constraint when pressed about the legal requirement.
“How long will that be?” interrupted Fox News’s Laura Ingraham as the Pentagon chief rattled off the White House’s intention to bring even more federal forces to Washington’s doorstep.
“Who knows!” Hegseth exclaimed.
“Well it costs money, right?” Ingraham continued. “The question is, are you there for a year? Are you there for six months? And when the troops pull out, what happens then?”
“I would call this conditions-based,” Hegseth said. “I would say it’s a situation where we’re here to support law enforcement. And the more we can free them up to do their job, the more effective they can be, the more we can work—I mean, this isn’t my realm, but the Justice System to make sure people who are arrested are actually locked up. That’s why the president is talking about cashless bail and sanctuary cities. If you’re illegal here in D.C., that’s going to be a problem.”
“Weeks, months, what will it take, that’s the president’s call,” Hegseth lied.
Hegseth: He has the guts to say I am going to bring in the National Guard…Ingraham: For how long?Hegseth: Who knows Ingraham: Are you there for a year? Six months?Hegseth: I would call this conditions based pic.twitter.com/jF2vAgePm5
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2025
Violent crime has been on the decline in Washington since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.
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