The District of Columbia National Guard and the President

Title 49 of the D.C. Code, most of it enacted by Congress in 1889 and 1909, still governs the District of Columbia National Guard. The President commands it. D.C. Code 49-409: "The President of the United States shall be the Commander-in-Chief of the militia of the District of Columbia." The Code's editor's notes point to Executive Order 11485 of October 1, 1969 for the supervision and control of the Guard, which runs through the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army rather than the Mayor. The Home Rule Act adds, at D.C. Code 1-206.02(b), that nothing in it vests "in the District government any greater authority over ... the National Guard of the District of Columbia" than the appointed Commissioner had before 1975. So the Mayor does not command the District's Guard; the President orders it out. Pay for civil disturbance duty. D.C. Code 49-901, unamended since 1909, provides that whenever the Guard is ordered to duty "in case of riot, tumult, breach of the peace, or whenever called in aid of the civil authorities, all enlisted men who do duty shall be paid at the rate equivalent to 2 times the pay of enlisted men of the regular Army of like grade", while officers get regular Army pay, and that in actual federal service everyone gets regular Army pay. We found no record of how, or whether, the double rate is applied to modern Title 32 missions; ask the Guard's finance office if you are on such duty. What District law gives its members. Very little beyond leave for District employees, covered in the military leave entry, and D.C. Code 49-807 on tuition money, covered in the tuition entry. There is no District death benefit, no District Guard pension and no District reemployment statute; the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act protects civilian jobs, including during full-time National Guard duty under Title 32. Why it matters for benefits. Many state Guard benefits in this catalog are written into a state's military code and paid from its treasury. The District's are appropriated by Congress each year, as with the Wherley tuition program, or come from federal law directly. When a guide compares the District's Guard benefits to Maryland's or Virginia's, this is the reason the list is short.