President Trump is deploying the D.C. National Guard and taking temporary control of the city's police force, marking a significant escalation in his long-running threats to federalize the nation's capital.
"I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," Trump said Monday. "This is Liberation Day in D.C. and we're going to take our capital back."
Despite Trump's claims, overall violent crime has dropped sharply in D.C. after spiking in the city and around the country after COVID. Violent crime reached a 30-year low in 2024 and is further down 26% from this time last year, according to data from D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).
Nonetheless, Trump is authorized to deploy the National Guard and assume emergency control over the MPD under home rule, the form of limited self-governance that Congress granted D.C. under the Home Rule Act in 1973.
Home rule allows residents to elect their own mayor and city council. But it maintains Congress' control over things like its legislation and budget, and gives the president certain powers he does not have over states.
Before home rule, D.C. was governed by a long series of presidentially appointed commissioners.
"A full century went by without any elected government at all," says Sarah Jane Shoenfeld, a public historian of D.C.
Even after home rule was implemented, there was a period in the 1990s when a federally created board oversaw the city's finances.
As Trump asserts control over law enforcement in the city, it's worth understanding how D.C. got here, even if you're not among the roughly 700,000 people who call it home. Here's what life in D.C. looked like under previous periods of expanded federal control, and how things changed.
1874: All the president's commissioners
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the federal district, but what exactly local governance should look like has been a longtime question.
Congress incorporated the city of Washington in 1802, along with an elected city council and a mayor appointed by the president, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The structure of the local government evolved over the decades; for example, the mayor could be popularly elected starting in 1820. In the meantime, both the House and Senate established standing committees focused on D.C. affairs.
A major change happened in 1871, when Congress consolidated multiple local jurisdictions into a single government with a typical territorial structure: a governor appointed by the president, an elected delegate in Congress and a two-chamber legislative assembly.
But those changes didn't last long. D.C. had seen a huge influx of Black migration after the Civil War, and by this point was about 30% Black.
"This was during the heart of the wind-down of the Reconstruction Period, when we actually had Black officials being elected to office both locally and in Congress," Shoenfeld says. "As that was happening there was a lot of pushback against Black governance and rising Black political participation."
In 1874, a wary Congress implemented a new form of governance in D.C: a three-member, presidentially appointed commission. The commission, along with Congress' standing committees, ran the city for the next century.
Shoenfeld says the government was seen as effective only by the people who had connections to it, like white business leaders and homeowners associations.
"The committees were sort of notoriously stacked with southern segregationists, so you had quite an antipathy for people who actually lived in the city, especially as the city became increasingly Black" starting in the 1940s, she says.
1974: Home rule begins
By the 1960s, D.C. was home to a majority-Black population and a growing push for home rule, which was deeply intertwined with the Civil Rights Movement.
George Derek Musgrove, an associate history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital, says residents were fed up with being governed by lawmakers from other parts of the country who didn't align with their interests.
"So you have a three-quarters Black city and many of the white residents are liberal on most issues at the time," he says. "And it's run by some of the most retrograde members of Congress in the entire institution."
Advocates' efforts paid off: Congress voted to pass the Home Rule Act in 1973. Musgrove says the Cold War was also a factor: "The lack of democracy in the capital of the United States had become a tremendous embarrassment."
While Congress was eager to offload some of the logistical responsibilities of running a city, he says, it was apprehensive about the prospect of a majority-Black local government and wanted to make sure the federal government could "serve as a backstop against anything in the city that they might find uncomfortable."
That's why Congress left itself the power to overturn local legislation and dictate how D.C. can spend its money, by passing laws and attaching riders to the federal budget. Home rule also prohibits D.C. from collecting taxes from commuters, universities and national organizations — limitations that persist today.
"The basic idea is that home rule creates all of these boxes for the city that limit its power," Musgrove says. "And some of them are quite fatal to the city's prospects for a flourishing economy and democracy."
1995: The Control Board era
After two decades of home rule, however, D.C. found itself in deep financial trouble as a result of factors including white flight, a nationwide recession and the limitations imposed by Congress.
"The city goes bankrupt in the 1990s, primarily because Congress had set up this system that was guaranteed to bankrupt us," Musgrove says. "And then it turns around and blames the city's management, the mayor, for the problems it had created."
By 1995, D.C.'s deficit had grown to $722 million and Wall Street dropped its bond ratings to "junk" levels, leaving the city unable to pay its vendors or obtain a line of credit.
Then-Mayor Marion Barry — who served from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999 — recognized the level of financial disarray and asked the federal government to step in, says Shoenfeld.
In 1995, Congress created a body called the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority, known as the Control Board (other cities, like New York and Chicago, had their own during periods of financial instability).
Its five members, appointed by President Bill Clinton, were tasked with overseeing the district's finances and had the authority to override decisions by the mayor and city council. They took those powers further than expected, says Shoenfeld.
"The level of control that the Control Board insisted on exercising was not what [Barry] wanted and it sort of ended up being like a hostile takeover, ultimately, where they insisted on appointing the heads of every local agency," Shoenfeld says. "The [city] council basically was in charge of the library and department of recreation and that was about it. It very much felt like an affront to the people of the city."
The Control Board took controversial actions like abolishing the city's lottery board, firing the superintendent of schools, replacing the elected Board of Education with appointed trustees and firing hundreds of government workers. But it also identified the need to adjust the financial relationship between D.C. and the federal government in order to relieve some of the district's financial burdens.
The end result was the National Capital Revitalization and Self-Government Improvement Act, which Congress passed in 1997. It shifted some financial responsibilities away from the city, including closing its local prison and transferring its inmates to federal institutions across the country. It also established federal funds for D.C.'s courts.
Those changes helped D.C. regain its financial footing, and by fiscal year 2001 it had balanced five consecutive budgets — allowing the Control Board to dissolve a year earlier than initially planned, according to a Brookings Institution history.
As of last year, D.C. had balanced its budget for 29 straight years, according to Mayor Muriel Bowser's office. Shoenfeld says that while the city still has its struggles, federal control can be more of a problem than a solution.
"I would hope that people understand that D.C. has a long history of effectively being able to govern itself," she says. "But I would also hope that people understand how difficult that has been for us because of the limitations of the Home Rule Act and how compromised our whole situation [is]."
2025: Trump's law enforcement takeover is unprecedented
While D.C. has been under various forms of federal control before, Shoenfeld says the kind of takeover Trump is implementing is largely unprecedented.
Trump is the first president to federalize the MPD, according to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. in Congress as a nonvoting member.
"None of the issues Trump is citing have really much to do with the hindrances we're dealing with," Shoenfeld says. "He's not talking about our inability to balance our budget, or bring in revenue or those kinds of things which actually we are very limited by, or things that have to do with our court system, which we don't have control over."
Residents of the overwhelmingly blue city want D.C. to become the 51st state, with 86% voting for statehood in a 2016 referendum. But the idea has not found adequate support in Congress.
Half a century ago, Shoenfeld says, home rule passed in part because of support from voters in other states. Today, she thinks Trump's takeover could lend similar momentum to the longtime push for D.C. statehood.
"Perhaps this will bring the issue to more peoples' attention around the country, that D.C. totally lacks the power to do anything in the face of what Trump's talking about," she adds.
Copyright 2025 NPR
