The National Guard Bureau, the District of Columbia National Guard and the U.S. General Services Administration have awarded apartment-hotel rental company Placemakr $292 million to provide up to 2,000 “apartment-style lodging units” for troops assigned to the Joint Task Force-District of Columbia mission, the Guard announced.
The contract, the largest interagency lodging acquisition in the history of the Guard, comes as part of ongoing support for the Trump administration’s “Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful” executive order.
The length of the D.C. task force’s mission, which kicked off in August 2025, has made current lodging arrangements unsustainable, a Guard release stated. Mobilized troops have been staying in hotels throughout the region.
The Guard is hoping a long-term housing remedy will improve overall quality of life and flexibility for those mobilized while reducing taxpayer expenses, the release stated. The acquisition process was reportedly completed in under three months, “despite an agency-level vendor protest, which was reviewed and denied.”
“This contract delivers stable, secure housing for our soldiers and airmen while achieving significant cost savings for the government,” Monica Williams, executive director of acquisitions and head of contracting activity for the National Guard Bureau, said in the release. “We were able to move quickly to meet mission requirements and provide a long-term solution for deployed personnel.”
The contract pricing, according to Guard and GSA figures, is “about 49% below projected short-term commercial hotel costs and 27% below standard GSA schedule pricing for lodging and housekeeping services.”
The new arrangement comes on the heels of a May 28 report, meanwhile, that assessed that the 2,000-plus National Guard troops to have participated in the D.C. task force have had “no measurable effect on violent crime.”
The report, published by the Niskanen Center, described the Guard deployments as “an expensive tool” used in “the wrong places for the wrong types of crime.”
Researchers cited the $607 average daily cost per Guard member in the nation’s capital, compared with $384 in pay for Metropolitan Police Department officers.
Robbery and other violent crime rates in the D.C. area had also decreased prior to the Guard deployment, the report said. Those numbers were not impacted by the military operation.
Still, the report’s authors stopped short of calling the deployment a waste, noting that there was a 24% decline in opportunistic property crime recorded in the first six months of the operation.
“We brought 2,500 Guardsmen in from 15 states and the District of Columbia, and you all have done an amazing job,” Gen. Steve Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told troops in D.C. in July. “[Since arriving] you saved over 235 lives. You’ve done over 530 medical assistances to personnel, you restored children back to their families 27 times, and you have done amazing things in support of law enforcement to make sure we reduce crime.”
J.D. Simkins is Editor-in-Chief of Military Times and Defense News, and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
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