Trump’s second term has been much more than just a symbolic blow to D.C. culture; his administration is reshaping our economy and destabilizing neighborhoods. New data from the Brookings report shows visitor demand and local spending falling across the DMV. This decline aligns with the steady militarization of our streets, heightened immigration enforcement, and a federal agenda that treats D.C. as a scapegoat rather than a community.
Tourism makes up roughly a third of D.C.’s consumer economy. When visitors stay away, the impact lands first on the workers who keep this city running: hotel staff on Capitol Hill, bartenders in Shaw, vendors on the Mall. Lower spending means less revenue for schools, transit, and clinics. It also fuels pressure to “replace” lost dollars by courting large developers. This funnels public money upwards while longtime residents are pushed aside, as we most recently saw in the Navy Yard neighborhood as well as many other neighborhoods over the years.
This is how an area becomes financially brittle and dangerous: declining revenue, anxious residents, and public dollars diverted into security posturing instead of housing, healthcare, and economic support. When budgets tighten, cuts fall on shelters, treatment programs, and schools. We tragically saw how devastating our mental health and drug crisis can be just this week as L.A. lost a beloved Hollywood couple to this scourge. The instability that follows disinvestment — crime, houselessness, shuttered businesses, addiction — is then cited as proof that black and brown neighborhoods are “failing,” clearing the way for redevelopment that serves outside investors rather than existing communities.
Additionally, the federal government has been burning through roughly a million dollars a day just to keep the National Guard stationed in D.C., this is before there were extra troops rushed in after the shooting. That kind of escalation doesn’t just blow a hole in public budgets that we have no say in; it ramps up the risk for guards people and residents alike.
Washingtonians understand what’s happening. When the National Guard appears or ICE intensifies operations, it’s clear whose interests are being protected. It is not the grandmother in Congress Heights or the student at George Washington — it is the speculative capital now circling neighborhoods in the Southeast the way they once circled Navy Yard. The more money steered toward these federal theatrics, the easier it becomes to claim disinvestment is unavoidable.
But none of this is inevitable. Residents are not passive. We are the revenue, the culture, and the labor that sustains this city. When we organize through elections, tenant associations, unions, congregations, and mutual aid, we garner the power to demand priorities that reflect our needs: demilitarized streets, investment in public housing, and support for workers and small businesses. We need to come out fighting against the subsidies for data centers that raise utility costs and extract our data as they have done to our neighbors in the DMV.
We must not accept the current disregard for the District while resources flow into militarization and elite comfort. We can not afford the apathy of many locally elected officials we trusted to represent us and our best interests. Let’s fight to redirect investments back into our most vulnerable wards, and every community treated as collateral damage. D.C.’s budget must serve D.C.’s people, not corporate interests or political theatrics.
This is our nation’s capital and our home. It’s time to assert that every public dollar should make D.C. more stable, more equitable, and more livable for the people of this city.