While the Trump administration told the Supreme Court that construction on President Donald Trump’s much-demanded White House ballroom was already “65 percent finished,” a new analysis of government documents by the Washington Post has revealed that number is far higher than the reality. “By the White House’s own standard for measuring the project’s progress, established in a confidential agreement with contractor Clark Construction,” reports the Post, “work on the controversial project was far less complete.”
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As the Post elaborates, “The agreement, finalized before Clark began demolition last October, stipulates that payments to the contractor be proportional to the amount of work completed, and that work cannot begin until the government approves spending for it. Based on that, if 65 percent of the work has been done, then the government should already have paid 65 percent of the total cost of the project.”
But according to publicly available appropriations data, “as of the end of July, the White House budget office had approved $144 million in spending from an account used to pay for the East Wing and other White House projects. Even if that entire amount were spent on the East Wing, it would come to only about 24 percent of the $600 million estimated construction cost that Clark provided the White House in March.” What’s more, “In the same mid-August court filing in which the administration claimed 65 percent of the project was done, it said that it had already spent ‘around $200 million.’ If the government had spent $200 million on the East Wing project, the work would be just 33 percent complete, based on the $600 million budget estimate.”
“You really want to understand why there’s such a big gap there,” said retired D.C.-area architect and former president of the American Institute of Architects Carl Elefante, calling the government’s claim about the completion percentage “doubtful.”
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According to the Post, “The 65 percent claim was made in a sworn declaration by Joshua Fisher, the director for White House Management and Administration, who is overseeing the construction project. In the declaration, Fisher did not explain how the percentage was calculated but said, ‘Work has progressed too far to go back to the drawing board.’ His assertion came as the administration asked the Supreme Court to allow work on the ballroom to continue after lower courts ruled that the project was probably illegal without congressional approval and that construction must stop. The administration argued in part that stopping work while courts considered the merits of the case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation would cause ‘chaos in service of nothing’ because the project had already progressed ‘beyond the point of judicial intervention.’”
According to the Post’s calculations, “Measured by the expected duration of the work, the project is about 30 percent complete, according to the administration’s timeline. Fisher said in his declaration that construction began in late October 2025 and is expected to be complete in August 2028. That puts the work 10 months into a 34-month construction schedule.”
Trump is reportedly still “tinkering around” with details of the ballroom. According to the Post, “Some of those changes involve the ballroom’s exterior. Renderings that the administration shared with the Supreme Court this month included the addition of a new feature that Trump picked out — golden seals on the exterior of the ballroom — and the restoration of another feature, a staircase, that had been included in prior plans before being abandoned.”
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