“He did WHAT to the East Wing?” began a recent opinion piece in my local paper, titled “The Problem with Unwanted Ballrooms”. It goes without saying that if President Trump did it, it must be deplorable, but according to this columnist Trump’s arrogance reached a new level with his plan to add a spacious, glamorous addition to the White House. This project is already well underway, with Trump derangement stoked by online photos of a construction site where the East Wing of the White House once stood.
The Epoch Times published a two-page spread about the new ballroom, showing architect’s renderings of an elegant space designed to entertain up to 999 guests. It’s gorgeous. Up to now, large White House gatherings had to be hosted outdoors, in tents, so the addition of a modern ballroom seems reasonable to me. Not only that, but the entire project is being funded by private donations, not U.S. taxpayers. So far so good. Why all the indignation?
Then an eye-opening Substack came my way, called “Trump Isn’t Building a Ballroom” by investigative journalist Audrey Henson. In her “Drey Dossier”, Henson lays out a convincing case that the “ballroom” project is actually a cover for a ninety thousand square feet, $300 million, underground secure government facility similar to “Oracle’s underground data centers in Jerusalem, built in 2021 for Israeli military intelligence. Nine stories into bedrock, designed to survive missile strikes, built to house AI systems that make life-and-death decisions in real time. Ninety thousand square feet. $319 million. Nearly identical specs to what Trump just announced.”
Step by step, “Drey” digs into the details. The lead contractor is Clark Construction, builder of military command centers and top-secret intelligence campuses like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Campus, CISA Cybersecurity Headquarters, and USCENTCOM Headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. After demolition had already started Trump replaced the original architect, James McCrery, who designs beautiful churches, with Shalom Baranes, who designs secure wedges, SCIFs, and bomb-resistant architecture for buildings like the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, Potomac Electric began replacing 45-year-old power feeders near the East Wing, increasing power capacity by five hundred percent in a neighborhood where office occupancy has been declining, buildings sit half-empty, and commercial real estate demand has shrunk. At the same time, DC Water began a $300 million project to upgrade the GSA Central Heating and Cooling Plant with industrial-scale cooling towers and chillers designed for handling tremendous heat.
The project is being funded by private donors, which means no congressional appropriations, no budget hearings, no public scrutiny. Carrier Corporation, which has a division specializing in data center cooling infrastructure, is donating the HVAC systems. Caterpillar, which makes 100 megawatt backup power generators, is a donor. Union Pacific, owner of the Department of Defense’s secure fiber communications backbone, is also a donor. So are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Palantir, and Booz Allen Hamilton, builder of classified networks for intelligence agencies.
The military doesn’t typically get involved in ballroom design, but they’re very much involved in this project. Israel’s underground data centers in Jerusalem were built for Project Nimbus, their government cloud infrastructure. Targeting systems, surveillance infrastructure, operational decision-
making, all on an underground network protected from both digital and physical threats, specifically designed to function no matter what happens above ground.
All this has to be at the White House to avoid oversight. Infrastructure that’s part of the Executive Office of the President at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, can be classified under executive privilege. The East Wing sits directly above the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and this facility is obviously being upgraded in a major way. The ballroom is the cover story; it’s definitely not the main project.
Back to “The Problem with Unwanted Ballrooms”. The columnist who wrote this was so blinded by “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that she totally missed the real story. It makes sense to upgrade the public space at the White House. It makes even more sense to have a secure, state-of-the-art command center right on the property. We have a President who’s experienced at building large, complicated projects on time and on budget, and this one is happening at a record pace. All this seems like a good thing to me.
An Adams County resident since 1997, Steve Boehme is a local Adams County businessman and political commentator, who published the Adams County CROSSROADS magazine from 2005 until 2019.
