Senate

Senate GOP balks at $1B in security for White House ballroom, despite Secret Service pitch

Comments:

by Alexander Bolton - 05/13/26 6:00 AM ET

Comments:

Link copied

by Alexander Bolton - 05/13/26 6:00 AM ET

Comments:

Link copied

NOW PLAYING

A proposal to provide $1 billion in federal funds to provide security for a new White House ballroom is in danger of being stripped from a budget reconciliation package after Republicans responded skeptically to the idea.

“I don’t have the details I need to support it. It was one thing when private dollars were building it. If you’re asking me for a billion dollars, I have some really hard questions,” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) said before a Tuesday meeting with Secret Service Director Sean Curran.

GOP senators had lunch with Curran in the Capitol’s Mansfield Room on Tuesday as he pitched them on the need to spend $1 billion — substantially more than the ballroom was initially projected to cost — on security enhancements to the ballroom and the White House grounds more generally.

GOP senators said they wanted more details to justify the project, which is now estimated to cost several times more than the $200 million renovation President Trump announced in July.

“If I were a businessman and an employee came and said, ‘I have a project, and it’s a billion dollars,’ I’d say, ‘You made that number up.’ Like, where did the number come from? I want to see data,” Curtis said.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Tuesday said she expects Trump to “keep” his “commitment” to fund the ballroom with private donations but acknowledged there “may need to be some additional security provided” by Congress for the project.

Collins, who faces a tough reelection race in November, said she had “no idea” how colleagues came up with the $1 billion to fund security enhancements.

“I have no idea where the billion-dollar figure came from, but it should not be used for building the ballroom. It’s my understanding there’s going to be a bunker underneath” the ballroom, she said.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who will mark up the budget reconciliation bill next week, is predicting the $1 billion for the ballroom will get pulled from the bill before it comes to the Senate floor.

“I don’t think it will be in there, is what my guess is,” he predicted.

Republican senators are pumping the brakes on the proposal amid a barrage of political attacks from Democrats.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) is building his messaging strategy around the ballroom for next week’s debate on the budget reconciliation package, offering a preview of the fall’s campaign ads.

“Prices are rising, families are hurting, Americans know exactly who’s making it worse,” Schumer said at a press conference Tuesday, citing a new CNN poll showing that 77 percent of Americans say Trump has raised their costs.

“What is the GOP response? A billion-dollar ballroom. Fancy, gold-plated. It’s outrageous,” he said.

“These are the ballroom Republicans,” he said. “At the very moment Americans are pleading for relief, Republicans are telling them: Pay for Trump’s palace first. This bill has $0 to lower costs for families.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another senior member of the Appropriations Committee, said she needs more details before approving $1 billion for the ballroom construction project.

“I need to understand what the security piece of it is. I just don’t know,” she said while walking into the GOP lunch meeting.

GOP wariness is growing after supporters repeatedly raised the projected cost of the ballroom, which was $200 million until last month, when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) unveiled a bill to authorize $400 million to fund the ballroom and a national security facility beneath it.

Now, the project may wind up costing substantially more than what Graham proposed.

Republican senators are closely scrutinizing the mounting projected costs of the ballroom amid media reports that Trump’s repairs to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool wound up costing more than $13 million — far more than the $1.8 million price tag that was initially announced.

Republicans control 53 seats in the Senate, which means the defection of four or five GOP senators could be enough to strip taxpayer funding for the ballroom out of the budget reconciliation package, which is scheduled to come to the floor next week.

Curran, the Secret Service director, told Republican senators Tuesday that only about 20 percent of the $1 billion could go to securing the ballroom, and the rest would go to other Secret Service priorities.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said there was a lot of “back-and-forth” debate at Tuesday’s meeting.

“It was a good back-and-forth, a good discussion, and obviously we had a lot of questions that were asked by our colleagues, just to get the details and precision as much as possible about how the dollars are going to be used,