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trump administration
'A Foundation of Lies': Trump Planned to Spend $300 Million in Taxpayer Dollars on Ballroom While Claiming It Was Privately Funded
"They cut your healthcare while spending taxpayer dollars on a golden ballroom for Donald Trump," said Rep. Greg Casar. "And they lied about it."
Jun 16, 2026
Internal documents show that President Donald Trump was lying when he said taxpayers would not be footing the bill for his massive White House ballroom.
Reiterating what he'd already said countless times, the president claimed in March that the project was "taxpayer-free" and entirely funded by private donors, who'd spend $400 million to build it in the now-demolished East Wing of the White House.
But at the time he made these comments, he knew that was untrue.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that a detailed project summary made three weeks earlier showed the total construction cost at $600 million, with more than half of the funds coming from taxpayers.
Here is a montage of Trump promising his ballroom won't cost taxpayers any money, despite new reports that taxpayers will be paying for half of the $600M project https://t.co/51scEAuOfX pic.twitter.com/EqUPUUSxqX
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 16, 2026
The Post continued:
By the time Trump made his comments in March, 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...
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.
According to the March 5 estimate reviewed by the Post, $293 million worth of funding is coming from donors—many of whom have received new or extended federal contracts over the past six months.
The rest of the money comes from taxpayer-funded sources: $155 million would come from the Secret Service, $149 million from the White House Military Office, and $3 million from the Executive Residence.
In May, Republicans in Congress proposed an additional $1 billion from taxpayers to fund “security adjustments and upgrades" for which Trump has said would be comprised of a subterranean six-story bunker complete with everything from bomb shelters to military medical facilities and a base to launch "unlimited numbers of drones."
Although that funding was ultimately excluded from the bill, taxpayer money is still being used through agency accounts, the Post's reporting shows.
The claim that the ballroom would not use taxpayer dollars has been repeated by other Republicans in Congress, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), who described it in May as "totally privately funded."
Asked by a reporter on Tuesday about the Post's revelation, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) contradicted this assurance, acknowledging that there "is certainly some expectation that there would be dollars allocated that would go above and beyond the private money that's been raised."
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Post that "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." He did not address questions about the taxpayer funding or the cost of the project.
The news has put many Republicans, particularly those who've voted to cut taxpayer-funded social welfare programs in the name of fiscal prudence, in an uncomfortable position.
A new investigation in the Washington Post examines an internal estimate in March evaluating the cost of President Trump’s White House ballroom and reveals that the project’s internal cost estimate is $600 million, half of which will be covered by taxpayers. Trump had previously… https://t.co/HbMxmQHOty pic.twitter.com/e5RoMsJWlN
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) June 16, 2026
Asked about the revelations by a reporter from Drop Site News, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) scoffed, "You believe everything in the Washington Post." Stating he had not seen the report, he said, "I'm sure they have anonymous sources."
Notably, the White House itself did not dispute the Post's story, nor did the story rely on anonymous sources.
Others fell back on the White House's security justification. Asked if he supported using taxpayer dollars for the project, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) responded, "I support protecting the president," and said he supports funding for "more Secret Service agents, something like that." The spending outlined in the Post's story does not include funding for more agents.
Public Citizen democracy advocate Jon Golinger called for an immediate investigation by Congress following revelations that taxpayer money was being spent.
"These secret records reveal that Trump’s ballroom is being built on a foundation of lies, fraud, and corruption," he said. "We are also calling for an investigation to uncover the names and actions of every Trump White House and administration official who was involved in this plot to circumvent congressional approval and spent unauthorized taxpayer dollars on Trump’s ballroom."
Golinger said the unauthorized use of taxpayer money could violate the Antideficiency Act, which "makes executive officials who engage in unlawful taxpayer spending schemes personally, and potentially criminally, liable for their actions."
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the unauthorized use of taxpayer funds was "a huge scandal."
"They cut your healthcare while spending taxpayer dollars on a golden ballroom for Donald Trump," he said, "And they lied about it.
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‘Elon Musk Should Have to Pay For This’: Trump Admin Says It Needs $1 Billion to Combat Screwworm
"Trump and Musk’s DOGE 'saved' $15 million by cutting a program dedicated to preventing the spread of screwworm," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "Now, there’s an outbreak infecting our beef and the administration is spending $1 billion."
Jun 16, 2026
When Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" took its chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy last year, it created bottlenecks that may have hampered the fight against the screwworm infestation currently menacing the southwest while making it much more expensive.
The annual US Department of Agriculture (USDA) spending to combat the flesh-eating insects only amounted to about $15 million per year. But along with about $382 million aimed at combating animal-borne illnesses around the globe, it was terminated in March 2025 as part of DOGE's effort to root out what it described as government "waste."
But now, with the pests bearing down on Texas and New Mexico, and at least 12 infections already identified in the US as of Tuesday, the Trump administration is spending at least $1 billion to fight the outbreak.
Brooke Rollins last November: We have screwworm under control south of the border. Beef prices will come down by spring 2026.
(The screwworm has just been detected in Texas for the first time in 60 years) pic.twitter.com/ozXdI88jXk
— FactPost (@factpostnews) June 4, 2026
Last week, during a Senate hearing, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins attempted to shift blame for the screwworm outbreak onto the Biden administration, while portraying herself and President Donald Trump as proactive in response to reports last spring that the insects were rapidly climbing through Central America.
Rollins said she asked Trump for "$1 billion to build a significant facility" in Texas that would breed hundreds of millions of sterilized male screwworm flies, a method that had been used to keep them contained in South America for decades. "Without hesitation, a couple questions, he said, ‘go.’”
That facility is expected to release around 300 million sterile flies per week. But it is not expected to be fully operational until the end of 2027.
In addition to the $15 million cut to monitoring the spread of the bugs from Panama, the Houston Chronicle reported that DOGE paused plans for a facility in Mexico that the Biden administration had authorized in 2024 as part of a $165 million emergency package to fight screwworm.
Amid mass layoffs at the USDA, it reported that funding for the facility—which was supposed to produce between 60-100 million sterile flies per week—was not announced until May 2025.
While the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) still says fly production at the facility is expected to begin "as early as summer 2026," it is still listed as "under construction."
Kevin Shea, who served as administrator of APHIS under the Obama administration and retired from the agency in January 2025, told the Chronicle that efforts to contain the screwworm were put on hold at the start of Trump's second term.
“This administration came in so skeptical of the career people, they didn’t really want to listen,” he said. “The hold up in the money going to Mexico for the sterile fly facility was most likely caught up in the whole DOGE thing. It probably looked like some sort of foreign aid.”
Journalist Christopher Collins wrote in the Texas Observer on Tuesday that, additionally, “deep staffing cuts" to APHIS, which lost nearly 1,900 employees during Trump's first year back in office, eliminated "the first line of defense against incoming parasites," who are responsible for "inspecting the cattle awaiting import from Mexico to ensure no screwworms are hitching a ride."
Not joking but @elonmusk should have to pay for this right?
You broke it, why do we all have to pay for it? https://t.co/7SSgyuP0yr
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 16, 2026
As the spread of screwworm across cattle country threatens to further drive up beef prices that have already increased by over 20% since Trump returned to office, critics of the administration are seizing on it to highlight the failure of the president's so-called "efficiency" initiative, which—despite the grandeur of Musk's cost-cutting claims—ended up costing taxpayers an estimated $165 billion, according to an April 2026 report from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called the screwworm saga a prime example of DOGE's "peak incompetence."
"Trump and Musk’s DOGE 'saved' $15 million by cutting a program dedicated to preventing the spread of screwworm," she said. "Now, there’s an outbreak infecting our beef and the administration is spending $1 billion."
Reacting to the news that the government was spending at least $1 billion to confront the screwworm crisis, Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim wrote on social media, "Not joking but Elon Musk should have to pay for this right?"
"You broke it," he said, tagging the man who recently became the world's first trillionaire. "Why do we all have to pay for it?"
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Pete Hegseth's D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy
Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis, and he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders. Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Jun 13, 2026
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about US dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.
This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.
Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the US government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.
Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?
It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
No.
Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?
Hardly.
Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far-right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of President Donald Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.
The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.
Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.
But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.
“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
The Immigration Obsession
The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: Other parties are on the ascendant. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.
Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and European Union bodies.
What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”
So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far-right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.
The Real Threats
It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Although Russian President Vladimir Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.
Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: None of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.
Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia; Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic; and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.
Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.
This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.
European Response
Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.
Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the US line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.
European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore US Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.
Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the US military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on US fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.
“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity, and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”
Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on US technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future US presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.
Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.
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