When President Trump announced Monday that the federal government would take control of Washington’s police department, he described the move as necessary to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.”
But in the more than six months since taking office, Mr. Trump’s actions, and in some cases inaction, have hobbled Washington’s efforts to reduce crime, drawing complaints from city leaders who say he is now trying to solve a problem that he has actually made worse.
City officials point to vacancies at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and on the Superior Court — staffing controlled by the federal government — as well as budget cuts of more than $1 billion as examples of how Mr. Trump has made it more difficult for law enforcement officials to combat crime. And while city leaders readily admit they have work to do to improve public safety, they argue that Mr. Trump’s picture of Washington as a dystopian hellscape is far from the reality.
“From having our courts be less able to hear and try and render justice to our ability to prosecute cases, the administration has absolutely harmed the District’s ability,” said Charles Allen, a Democratic member of the District of Columbia Council. “Now despite that of course, the city has done incredible work, I think, over the last two years as we have been able to lower violent crime significantly.”
He added, “We don’t see sincerity or consistency in anything coming out of this administration.”
Despite Mr. Trump’s claims that Washington “has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” most categories of violent crime peaked in 2023 and have been falling since. In 2025, violent crime has fallen about 26 percent compared with the same time period last year, while homicides have dropped about 11 percent.
“For years, D.C. leaders have turned a blind eye to the crime crisis plaguing local communities, and now that President Trump has taken bold action to Make D.C. Safe Again, they’re trying to shift the blame and pass the buck because they don’t want to take responsibility for their failures,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
She added: “If these D.C. leaders are looking for someone to blame, they should look in the mirror. President Trump will be busy cleaning up their mess.”
But even as Mr. Trump has promised Washington would be “crime free” in the “coming months,” some of his own officials have complained about a lack of resources. At a news conference on Tuesday, Washington’s new U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, lamented that her office was severely understaffed.
“Nobody seemed to care that we were down 90 lawyers, 60 investigators and paralegals,” she said, adding that she has received special permission from Mr. Trump to fill some of those positions despite the sweeping hiring freeze imposed by his administration.
Michael Romano, a former prosecutor in that office who resigned from the Justice Department earlier this year, called Ms. Pirro’s comments “false and offensive,” given how Mr. Trump’s previous handpicked head of that office, Ed Martin, drove so many experienced prosecutors away.
“The office lacks staff because Trump and his supporters cared deeply about gutting it,” said Mr. Romano, who was a deputy chief on the team prosecuting cases surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Trump’s appointees fired attorneys from that office who worked on Jack Smith’s team. They fired probationary attorneys who had worked on Jan. 6 cases. They fired and demoted managers who were excellent and widely respected. All of these moves were made with no cause. And these moves have driven other outstanding professionals to quit.”
Mr. Smith was the special counsel who oversaw the government’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Trump, in one of his first acts in office, issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol.
A handful of the departed prosecutors have not gone far; they got new jobs as prosecutors across the Potomac River, in Virginia.
Tim Lauer, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said: “What Ed Martin did, he did before Judge Pirro became U.S. attorney. It doesn’t change the fact that this office is woefully understaffed and has been for years, and we are doing our best to fill these positions with competent prosecutors.”
Law enforcement in the nation’s capital has also been impeded by a lack of Superior Court judges, who are nominated by the president. Mr. Trump has made only one judicial nomination to that court, where the shortage exacerbates delays in trials and other court proceedings that take criminals off the streets. Mr. Trump’s lone nominee for the court has not yet been confirmed.
About 20 percent of the judicial positions in the city’s courthouse are unfilled, according to city officials and lawyers.
“There’s not a single piece of that that’s under our control,” Mr. Allen, the D.C. Council member, said. “That is all federal, and that is on the administration.”
Ms. Pirro said the administration was aware of the problem.
“We’re working on that,” she said, promising that judicial nominations for the Superior Court will come “soon.”
A spokesman for Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, declined to comment. After Mr. Trump took over the police department, Ms. Bowser criticized the decision but has tried to talk instead about how the federal government could bolster the city’s efforts to reduce crime.
Even as violent crime has dropped in Washington, car thefts, carjackings and youth violence still pose significant concerns to many city residents. The president’s apocalyptic complaints, and residents’ fears, sometimes encompass quality-of-life issues that are not reflected in crime statistics, such as homelessness, aggressive panhandling or drug overdoses on public streets.
And so after a prominent member of the Department of Government Efficiency was beaten in what police said was an attempted carjacking earlier this month, Mr. Trump followed through on his threat to take control of Washington’s police force, using a law that allows him to do so for up to 30 days. Officials have said that 800 National Guard members and roughly 500 federal law enforcement agents were also being deployed to the city to help curb crime.
Local officials say federal budget cuts have hampered their crime prevention efforts, too. The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to cut $20 million in funding for Washington. as part of the agency’s urban security fund. Cities across the country are set to receive less money as part of the fund than last fiscal year, though D.C. would lose 44 percent of its funding, the largest cut of any of the cities in the program.
And when Congress passed a stopgap spending bill in March to fund the federal government at existing spending levels, lawmakers did not include routine language that exempted the D.C. budget from the freeze. That essentially forced a $1.1 billion cut on the District of Columbia, which gets most of the money it spends on services from locally raised taxes, not federal funds.
“At the same time that the federal government is spending money on a performative show of force in the District of Columbia, it is cutting funding for the things that we know actually make communities more safe — economic support, health care, high quality education and housing,” said Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director of the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Initiative.
Michael Gold contributed reporting.