President Trump said he is considering taking over the police force of Washington, D.C., after a former member of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was injured in an attempted carjacking over the weekend.
"He went through a bad situation to put it mildly, and there's too much of it. We're going to do something about it," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday evening. He also said, "That includes bringing in the National Guard, maybe very quickly, too."
When asked whether the administration wants to overturn D.C.'s home rule — a form of limited self-government that the city has operated under for half a century — Trump said, "We're going to look at that. In fact the lawyers are already studying it."
The former DOGE staffer whose assault led to Trump's remarks is Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old nicknamed "Big Balls." Coristine worked for the General Services Administration (GSA) — where he was granted access to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services payment data — until his resignation in June, as NPR has reported.
According to a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) incident report shared with NPR, Coristine was standing with a woman near his car in an area of Logan Circle — a neighborhood in northwest D.C. — around 3 a.m. on Sunday when he was attacked by a group of "approximately ten juveniles."
"He saw the suspects approach and make a comment about taking the vehicle," the report reads. "At that point, for her safety, he pushed his significant other … into the vehicle and turned to deal with the suspects. The suspects then began to assault [Coristine]."
Most of the suspects fled on foot as patrolling police arrived, though the MPD said officers arrested two of them — both 15 years old — at the scene and charged them with unarmed carjacking. MPD also said Coristine was treated at the scene for injuries sustained in the assault.
In a Tuesday Truth Social post, Trump wrote that crime in D.C. is "totally out of control," alleging that teenagers are "randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens" and calling for the teens to be prosecuted as adults.
While a 2023 spike in killings and robberies made the city one of America's deadliest, and juvenile crime remains a concern, violent crime in D.C. has been on the decline since last year when it reached a 30-year low, according to MPD data.
What happened to Coristine is relatively unusual, but it provided a political opportunity for Trump, says 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.
"Trump just automatically presents it as illustrative of the trend and therefore it justifies what he wants to do," he says.
Trump has repeatedly said the federal government should take control of D.C., both on the campaign trail and since the start of his second term.
This week, his calls were immediately echoed by a number of conservative figures, including Elon Musk and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who wrote in a post on X that she supports Trump in "taking over the city to establish law and order."
So what would federalizing D.C. mean — and can Trump actually do it?
Federalizing D.C. is possible, at least in theory
D.C. is home not only to the seat of the federal government but to over 700,000 residents, according to 2024 census data. It's also overwhelmingly blue: Trump only won about 4% of the D.C. vote in 2016, and less than 7% in 2024.
In recent years, Trump has been a vocal critic of the city, calling it "filthy and crime-ridden," "horribly run" and "a nightmare of murder and crime."
"The city doesn't particularly like him and he doesn't particularly like the city," says Musgrove. "And then you add to that that he's just used to claiming the existence of a crisis in order to claim that his position is the only way to solve it … and D.C. is just this really easy target that he's going to keep coming back to."
But Trump can't single-handedly make good on his threat of federalizing the district.
Congress passed the Home Rule Act in 1973, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. It gave D.C. residents more control over their own affairs — such as the right to elect a mayor and city council members — but maintained Congressional oversight over things like the city's budget and legislation.
To change that, Congress would need to overturn home rule. And that could be politically challenging, since Senate Democrats would theoretically be able to block such legislation through the filibuster.
Even so, two Republicans — Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn. — introduced such bills in February. For the first time since the start of home rule, Musgrove says, both the House and Senate now have bills aimed at repealing it.
"Trump cannot do this himself," Musgrove says. "However, Congress under Republicans has proved more than willing to do this for him if he asks for it. So it is within the realm of possibility."
But Musgrove also questions how much Trump really wants the federal government to be tasked with the minutiae of city governance, like trash pickups and filling potholes, especially since he can exert power over local government in other ways.
The federal government already has a lot of power in D.C.
Home rule gives the president control over the D.C. National Guard, allowing him to call it into the city without local consent. It also allows the president to use D.C.'s police force for up to 30 days if he "determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes" — though he needs to get Congressional approval to use the services of the police force for more than 48 hours, according to city code.
In his first term, Trump mused about putting D.C. under "much more control" by "pulling in" thousands of D.C. police officers to quell local Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, suggesting that the federal government would have "total domination" over the city, according to a CNN transcript of a call he had with U.S. governors at the time. In the end, though, he deployed the U.S. Park Police and National Guard.
Trump has also used his powers to influence local priorities. Earlier this year he issued an executive order creating the "D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force," whose goals include ramping up enforcement of federal immigration law, restoring federal public monuments and removing graffiti.
Just this week, the National Park Service cited that order as part of its justification for plans to reinstall a Confederate statue that protesters toppled in 2020.
More broadly, Musgrove says home rule — and specifically, the threat of Trump pushing Congress to repeal it — gives Trump leverage in negotiations with D.C.'s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser.
"All he has to do is threaten, and the mayor gets the hint," Musgrove says.
While Bowser has long been vocally critical of Trump, she's also complied with some of his demands in recent months, such as clearing homeless encampments and removing a "Black Lives Matter" street mural near the White House, after facing pressure from the administration and Congress.
"The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can't afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference," Bowser said in a March statement, after a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill that put federal funding at risk if D.C. didn't remove it.
That's one example of how Congress can shape D.C.'s policies. Federal lawmakers can also attach unrelated rules — called "riders" — about D.C.'s autonomy to federal appropriations bills. They can decide to overturn laws passed by the D.C. Council, as the Senate did in 2023 when it voted to block a major overhaul of the city's criminal code. Musgrove says.
"[Lawmakers] realized that that can be really good politics for people back home, and so they'll reach into the city to do things like ban the city from spending its own money on abortions or a needle exchange," Musgrove says. "It makes it difficult for [D.C.] to create laws, create policy, and execute them over time for the good of the population."
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