More than 16,000 individuals have been arrested in Washington since the launch of the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force one year ago, the U.S. Marshals Service said in an Aug. 10 statement.
The task force was established through a March 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that aimed to tackle concerns about crime, public order, and urban aesthetics in the nation’s capital.
“One year later, the results speak for themselves,” the U.S. Marshals Service said.
Those arrested include more than 3,200 people apprehended for narcotics-related crimes, more than 100 known gang members, and 35 homicide suspects. Almost 2,000 illegal firearms have been seized.
“This has been the largest, most aggressive law enforcement collaboration ever assembled to confront crime in a major American city,” the Marshals Service said.
In January, the task force arrested three MS-13 gang members wanted for first-degree murder over the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy. In October 2025, two other people were arrested for the attempted carjacking, robbery, and beating of a former staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency.
Last year, the task force also apprehended three individuals who gunned down a 21-year-old congressional intern in June 2025. This violent act became the catalyst for the creation of the task force, according to the Marshals Service.
Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington in an Aug. 11, 2025, executive order, which was followed by a federal law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.
In the order, Trump said that Washington had a higher violent crime, murder, and robbery rate than all 50 U.S. states. In 2024, the homicide rate in Washington was 27.54 per 100,000 residents, according to the executive order. The vehicle theft rate of 842.4 per 100,000 residents was the country’s highest and more than three times the national average.
Both homicide and vehicle theft crimes declined in the first half of 2026 from the same period last year, prior to launching the task force, according to an Aug. 11 report from the think tank Council on Criminal Justice.
Homicide was down 41 percent and motor vehicle theft by 54 percent. Other crimes that have declined during the period include sexual assault, robbery, carjacking, and larceny, according to the report.
In addition to arresting criminals, the task force also located 25 missing children over the past year, returning them to their homes, the Marshals Service said in its recent statement.
“The men and women of the U.S. Marshals Service, along with our partners from so many federal and local agencies, have tirelessly worked to make D.C. safer for those who live here and for those who visit our nation’s capital,” U.S. Marshals Service Director Gadyaces S. Serralta said.
“This operation shows the relentless dedication we have to investigate and apprehend the most violent, dangerous fugitives. When law enforcement works together, the impact is exponential. The D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force is proof of that the whole-of-government approach works.”
The deployment of federal forces in Washington has faced criticism from local officials. In April, City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said taxpayers were shelling out more than $1 million a day for National Guard members deployed in the city.
“The presence of armed soldiers on American streets is not a good look,” Mendelson said.
A report from the Congressional Budget Office suggested that National Guard deployment in Washington could cost $55 million a month, based on an estimate of 2,950 troop members. As of July 8, there were 5,148 National Guard troops assigned to the nation’s capital.
During a July 2 address at Washington’s Meridian Hill Park, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth credited National Guard members in the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force for a “staggering” drop in crime in the city.
Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, credited troop members for saving more than 235 lives.
Last month, the Pentagon confirmed that the National Guard deployment in Washington would continue until Jan. 20, 2029, the end of Trump’s current term.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.