(Zero Hedge)—A new extension of the National Guard’s deployment to Washington will keep guardsmen in the nation’s capital until President Donald Trump’s term ends in more than two years.
The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the mission for which National Guard troops were deployed will continue until Jan. 20, 2029, or until the president terminates it.
The extension would allow National Guard members to remain in Washington until the next president is inaugurated, unless Trump ends the deployment early.
The deployment was previously scheduled to expire at the end of 2026.
As Timothy Fudd details below for The Epoch Times, Trump first deployed the National Guard to Washington in August 2025. He said the capital was “under siege from violent crime” and suggested that Washington’s local government had “lost control of public order and safety.”
“It is my duty to our citizens and Federal workers to secure the safety and the peaceful functioning of our Nation, the Federal Government, and our city,” Trump said in a presidential memorandum.
As of July 8, the task force said 5,148 guardsmen had been assigned to Washington. The War Department previously confirmed that about half of the National Guard members currently deployed in Washington had been sent to the capital to support operations during the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
Metropolitan Police Department crime statistics from Jan. 1 to July 17 showed that homicides have dropped by 38 percent compared with the same period last year. Additionally, robberies have decreased by 18 percent, motor vehicle thefts by 53 percent, and property crimes by 23 percent.
While total crime is down 20 percent from last year, the number of assaults with a dangerous weapon has increased by 45 percent. Total violent crime has also increased by 1 percent from last year.
During an address at Washington’s Meridian Hill Park on July 2, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth credited National Guard members serving in support of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force for what he described as a “staggering” crime drop in Washington.
Speaking to more than 500 National Guard members, Hegseth said, “You’re not from Washington, most of you, but this is your capital, and you believe in this 250th year that it should be safe and it should be secure for every single citizen that lives here and every single citizen that comes to visit.”
Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, also credited National Guard members for saving more than 235 lives, providing more than 530 medical assists, and restoring children to their families 27 times.
While Hegseth said crime has “dropped in staggering amounts” with the task force’s support, some local government officials have criticized the deployment of National Guard members to Washington.
“Taxpayers are paying more than a million dollars a day to have them walk around,” City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said in April.
He added that “the presence of armed soldiers on American streets is not a good look.”
The Congressional Budget Office previously released a report suggesting that the continued deployment of National Guard members in Washington could cost $55 million a month, based on an estimate of 2,950 guardsmen.
Following Trump’s order for National Guard members to support law enforcement operations in Washington, two National Guard members were shot in the city last fall. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom died from her injuries, while Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was badly injured.
The suspected shooter was later identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national. Lakanwal was charged with 17 counts, including first-degree murder, in a superseding indictment in June. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.
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.