Trump’s National Guard Deployments Centralize Power and Undermine Federalism10/01/2025 • Mises Wire • Ryan McMaken
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has deployed—or threatened to deploy—National Guard troops in at least five American cities, including Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Many of Trump’s supporters have cheered this, claiming that it is the responsibility of the president to send federal troops wherever he determines they are needed.
In some cases, deployments have occurred over the objections of the governments in the states where the troops are deployed. This has led to a complex legal situation, with the governments of California and Oregon suing the administration over the deployments. Judges, pundits, and lawyers will surely continue to argue for some time over the current legality of these deployments—as interpreted by federal judges—in federal court.
The fact that this is a matter of debate at all, however, illustrates how far the United States has come from the American Revolutionaries’ original vision of a federal republic with a greatly limited and decentralized military force. In the founding era, Americans feared the existence of a standing army that could be deployed at the will of federal officials. Moreover, Americans demanded that the states maintain their own, independent militias that could not be subjected to federal control without the cooperation of state officials.
That attitude is now long gone.
Instead, we find that both Left and Right in the United States now generally support more federal control, depending on which political party is in power, or which group is on the receiving end of new federal prerogatives. At the moment, it’s the Right that is in power, and so it is now conservatives who are clamoring for more federal power to deploy troops, expand federal law enforcement, and further bury the last few vestiges of the sovereignty once enjoyed by state governments.
For those who are actually concerned about the further concentration of political power, and who support real limits on the federal government, the president’s habit of sending federal troops to American cities is serious problem.
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Source:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/trumps-national-guard-deployments-centralize-power-and-undermine-federalism
