On Friday President Donald Trump announced a task force to make the capital city of Washington D.C. safe and more prosperous in the face of rampant crime and despair. He signed an executive order on Friday which backs up legislation from Congress which will fund public functions of the district. Fascinatingly, investigative journalist Wid Lyman recently wrote an exposé following a ride-along with D.C. police where he documented the ‘third world wasteland’.
“D.C. is the only city that belongs to all Americans… As the capital city of the greatest Nation in the history of the world, it should showcase beautiful, clean, and safe public spaces,” President Trump wrote in a post Saturday.
Specifically, Trump’s taskforce focuses on the illegal alien invasion and allowing law-abiding citizens to carry firearms when licensed to do so.
“The task force would be responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, including ‘redirecting’ resources to ‘apprehend and deport illegal aliens’ in the D.C. area and monitoring the District’s ‘sanctuary-city status’,” Roll Call said Friday. “Other assignments for the task force include helping to speed up and lowering the cost of processing concealed carry license requests in D.C. and ’employing a more robust Federal law enforcement presence’ in the District.”
President Trump establishes a Task Force to make Washington D.C. safe and prosperous!
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 29, 2025
"D.C. is the only city that belongs to all Americans… As the capital city of the greatest Nation in the history of the world, it should showcase beautiful, clean, and safe public spaces."🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/VxWrdB1K5v
Being the capital city, Washington D.C. is a focus of national scorn for its rampant crime and poverty. While Trump, a Republican, seeks a safe city, the population largely votes for Democrat politicians, with over 90 percent voting blue in 2024.
D.C. has championed a crime rate well above the national average since at least 2006 when City Data began recording data. Generally, the crime rate of the nation’s capital is about twice that of the rest of the country.
“Trump on Friday threw his support behind the funding fix needed to allow the District of Columbia’s government to avoid $1.1 billion in budget cuts squeezed in the remaining half of the fiscal year, all but ensuring House passage of legislation the Senate passed two weeks ago,” Roll Call said Friday.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said that the bill would not involve federal spending, just use the local allocation to better the district.
“This bill would simply fix a mistake in the House CR,” Collins said on March 14. “There are no federal dollars involved. The issue here is just allowing the D.C. government to proceed to spend its own tax revenues.”