The cost of President Donald Trump’s sprawling White House ballroom project has spiraled to $600 million, with taxpayers paying roughly half of the bill, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Cost Overrun and Public Funding
The bombshell revelation shatters Trump’s initial insistence that funding for the biggest in a series of projects remaking the People’s House would come only from private donors. The new estimated construction cost also dwarfs the original $200 million price tag.
The Post’s reporting is based on a detailed project summary put together in March by Clark Construction, the contractor overseeing the massive White House project that has seen the East Wing demolished and a secure underground bunker added to the specifications. The Post obtained six cost estimates, including one dated March 5, indicating that the projected cost had ballooned to $600 million — with $155 million coming from the Secret Service, $149 million from the White House Military Office, and $3 million from the Executive Residence, all public funds. The rest, or $293 million, was said to be coming from unspecified “private sources.”
National Security Justification
The newspaper notes Trump has alluded to the Secret Service and the military contributing to security enhancements, without specifying the price of those upgrades. The ballroom’s completion was increasingly framed as a national security priority following an alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.
Earlier this month, a GOP Senate proposal to give $1 billion in security funding for the White House, including a share for the ballroom, was dropped after opposition from Democrats and some Republicans.
Trump’s Broken Promises
In any case, Trump initially promised the ballroom would be entirely financed by himself and through private donations. “It’s going to cost nothing. I will spend the whole thing myself, we will do a big beautiful room, but we can use it at the White House,” he told an event at the White House’s East Room in February last year.
“It’ll be done properly, and I will fund it,” he explained to Kristen Welker of NBC News during a tour of his Mar-a-Lago resort in May 2025. “I’m not going to ask the government for money. I’ll fund it, and I’m sure we’ll have some donations to it. But it’s not an inexpensive thing. It’ll cost a lot of money,” he added. “There’s not one dime of government money going into the ballroom,” Trump said to reporters while on board Air Force One in March, before referencing the military building a “big complex under the ballroom.”
Last summer, when revealing details about the then-$200 million project, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump and other unnamed individuals would provide funding. The publicly acknowledged costs of the 90,000-square-foot construction project, which broke ground in October last year, have since skyrocketed to $300 million and then $400 million.
Reactions and Responses
On Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) hit out at Trump after the president “swore this ballroom wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent.” “Donald Trump is a con artist,” he wrote on X.
In a statement to HuffPost, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said the project is “inextricably tied to the security of the president, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets.” While not referencing the Post report, he insisted the press release announcing the construction of the ballroom “highlighted coordination with the White House Military Office and the United States Secret Service regarding design features and planning.” Ingle added, “President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for presidents for generations to come.”
