Park Police officers make an arrest near the Washington Monument August 23, 2025 as National Guard troops look on. Image: Philip Yabut / Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffPresident Trump has signed an executive order directing federal agencies to expand law enforcement numbers in Washington DC and to work more closely with National Guard troops he called up to the nation’s capitol in recent days.
The order directs the National Park Service to hire more Park Police in DC and instructs the US Attorney’s Office to bring on additional prosecutors focused on violent and property crimes. Federal employees in law enforcement should expect expanded hiring, redeployment of resources, and potentially new assignments tied directly to restoring “public order” in the capital.
The order follows another in which Trump called up National Guard troops to patrol Washington DC – under section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act – in response to what he characterized as a “crime emergency,” and has since pointed out conditions in other major cities necessitating a new quick reaction force for public safety and to quell civil unrest.
According to the order, the DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force is setting up a website to recruit Americans with law enforcement or military backgrounds to join federal law enforcement entities. The initiative could create pathways for retired or off-duty officers, reservists, and federal employees in related roles to be quickly brought into specialized units.
“Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”
The order has stirred controversy by calling on the Pentagon to create a specialized National Guard unit with the DC Guard that could be deputized by the Justice, Homeland Security or Interior Departments to enforce federal law, raising questions about the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
Trump’s order continues a hiring push for federal law enforcement officers, for example into the CBP and ICE agents, for which DHS began waiving age limits for recruits and offering $50K signing bonuses.
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