This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The National Guard logged more than 400,000 member service days per year over the past decade responding to hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters, the Pentagon has revealed in a report to Congress.
The numbers mean that on any given day, 1,100 National Guard troops on average have been deployed on disaster response in the United States.
Congressional investigators believe this is the first public accounting by the Pentagon of the cumulative burden of natural disaster response on the nation’s military reservists.
The data reflect greater strain on the National Guard and show the potential stakes of the escalating conflict between states and President Donald Trump over use of the troops. Trump’s drive to deploy the National Guard in cities as an auxiliary law enforcement force—an effort curbed by a federal judge over the weekend—is playing out at a time when governors increasingly rely on reservists for disaster response.
In the legal battle over Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, that state’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, argued in part that Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek needed to maintain control of the Guard in case they were needed to respond to wildfire—including a complex of fires now burning along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, rejects the science showing that climate change is worsening natural disasters and has ceased Pentagon efforts to plan for such impacts or reduce its own carbon footprint.
The Department of Defense recently provided the natural disaster figures to four Democratic senators as part of a response to their query in March to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding planned cuts to the military’s climate programs. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who led the query on behalf of herself and three other members of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, shared the response with Inside Climate News.