Trump always planned to rely 'heavily' on taxpayers for his ballroom: internal projections

Many defenders of President Donald Trump's proposal for a White House ballroom insist that it will be privately funded and won't cost taxpayers anything. But according to Washington Post reporters Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell, the ballroom could cost U.S. taxpayers at least $300 million.

In fact, estimates from a contractor, Clark Construction, according to the Post reporters, showed that from the beginning, taxpayers would be paying some of the costs. And the price tag has kept increasing along the way, contractor estimates show.

Speaking to reporters at the White House Oval Office on March 31, Trump said of the ballroom, "This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents."

Blaskey and O'Connell, however, report that according to a "detailed project summary prepared for the White House" by Clark Construction, the estimated "total construction cost" of the ballroom is "$600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers."

"By the time Trump made his comments in March," the Washington Post reporters explain, "the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor's invoices obtained by The Post. Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost."

Blaskey and O'Connell continue, "At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades. Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced."

The Post, according to Blaskey and O'Connell, "obtained six cost estimates for the entire East Wing project, dated from July 2025 to March of this year" — and they show an increasing price tag as well as the expected sources of funding."

A preliminary estimate on July 11, 2025, Blaskey and O'Connell report, showed a cost of $270 million — with more than $100 million of that amount coming from taxpayers thanks, in part, to U.S. Secret Service costs. But the estimated cost of the ballroom has more than doubled since then, according to the Post reporters.

On the right, one of the Republicans who is sounding the alarm about how much Trump's ballroom project could cost taxpayers is Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

The Maine senator, who is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms, told the Post, "President Trump indicated that the ballroom was going to be built with private donations. I think that's the commitment that should be kept."

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