A shooting outside the White House on Saturday should put to rest any questions about the president’s funding request for his East Wing makeover, Donald Trump’s top economic adviser says.
A bill that would provide $1 billion dollars in taxpayer funds to cover security enhancements related to the $400 million ballroom was the cause of a rift in the GOP this week that led to the funding being shelved.
Now, Kevin Hassett, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, says the case has been made for the funding to be approved.
“My goodness, arguing about that after what happened yesterday... of course we’ve got to make the White House more secure,” Kevin Hassett told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Trump was at the White House on Saturday when a man approached a Secret Service checkpoint nearby and fired at officers before being shot in response. The shooter, who died from his injuries, did not make it onto White House grounds, though the incident sparked panic in light of a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month.
Hassett’s pivot to Saturday’s shooting came when he was put on the spot over funding for the president’s ballroom project. He claimed the billion dollar price tag presented to Congress earlier this month was for White House security enhancements, not the ballroom.
“The bottom line is the president believes the ballroom is something that should have been there for a long time and he’s using his own money and the money of donors to make it so that taxpayers don’t have to pay for the ballroom,” he said.
Host Nancy Cordes interjected to note that federal funds had in fact been sought in connection with the project, asking Hassett, “Well, they would have to pay a billion dollars, correct?”
“No, it’s not for the ballroom. It’s for securing the entire White House,” Hassett claimed.
Hassett’s assertion that the money in the bill would be used for the White House, not the ballroom, doesn’t square with what Trump himself has said, or the bill that was proposed to fund it.
The $1 billion taxpayer price tag comes from a request in an immigration funding bill that caused consternation inside and outside the Republican Party.
Draft wording of the bill included a $1 billion funding request from the Secret Service that explicitly mentioned the East Wing Modernization Project, specifying that part of the funding could be used for “above-ground and below-ground security features” of the ballroom project.
But Republicans, worried about the optics of funding a vanity project when Americans are increasingly concerned about the rising cost of living, clashed over the proposal, pulling the funding from a vote last week.
In a tour of the construction site on Wednesday, Trump, 79, told reporters he wasn’t just building a ballroom.
He said it was a “shield” for a massive six-story subterranean bunker that includes a military hospital and a “massive drone capacity.”
“Not only is it drone-proof, if a drone hits it, it bounces off, it won’t have any impact,” Trump said. “But it’s also meant as a drone port that would protect all of Washington.”
