A Republican senator who lost his primary race this week after Donald Trump endorsed his opponent went scorched earth on the president’s proposed $1 billion White House ballroom.
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana failed to advance to November’s general election after he came in third in Saturday’s primary. Trump’s handpicked candidate, Julia Letlow, finished first with 45 percent of the vote.
Cassidy has since vowed to vote against federal funding for Trump’s ballroom, which the president originally said would cost $100 million, then $200 million, then $300 million, then $400 million, and now finally $1 billion.
Asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he would vote to approve the funds, which Trump’s Senate allies slipped into a budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement through 2029, Cassidy laid out the major problem with the funding request.
“There’s no architectural plans. There’s no environmentals. There’s no engineering. There’s no sense of—[and] we asked—how did it happen to cost $1 billion?” he said. “In my mind, it could cost a lot less, it could cost a lot more. I just don’t get it.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The 79-year-old president stunned reporters during a walkthrough of the construction site on Tuesday when he revealed that the ballroom was actually a “shield” for a massive, multi-level subterranean bunker being built below.
Despite the president’s claims that he needs the funding for security reasons, Cassidy and a handful of his Senate colleagues have continued to reject the idea of funding the president’s vanity project at a moment when so many Americans are struggling under the weight of the cost-of-living crisis.
Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose the 90,000-square-foot ballroom, which would tower over the existing White House executive residence and West Wing.
The president demolished the historic East Wing last year without any warning to make way for what he originally described as a privately-funded event space that would hold 1,000 guests.
“I think this is just a spit in the eye insult to all my taxpayers in Louisiana to spend a billion on the ballroom when we should be doing something about the high price of gas, groceries, and healthcare,” Cassidy told his local network WWL-TV in an interview.
Senators Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski have expressed similar skepticism.
“One billion in ballroom funding is just not going to fly, right? It’s just not going to fly,” Murkowski said Wednesday.
Asked if he was worried about the project’s funding, Trump on Wednesday told reporters: “No. The ballroom is being built. I’m building the ballroom... It’s actually a military complex. The roof of the ballroom is a drone port and it gives great safety to everything below. We’re building a really great ballroom but it’s also a strong military position for our people.”
The president announced last year that he had received $350 million in funding from private donors, most of them from corporations holding a combined $279 billion in federal contracts, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Public Citizen.
