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Trump’s ballroom fight sheds new light on an underground White House bunker
President Trump holds a rendering of the East Wing modernization while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump’s dreams of a White House ballroom have highlighted what was once a relative secret: the construction of a military bunker beneath the now-demolished East Wing.
The administration started knocking down the East Wing in October to make way for Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom, a project that will cost at least $300 million. The plan has drawn disapproval from members of the public and ire from architectural and conservation groups, one of which sued to block it back in December.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation this week, when he ruled that construction of the ballroom “must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”
Yet, as the White House appeals the decision, Leon is allowing construction to continue for “the safety and security of the White House” — a nod to the administration’s argument that the renovation is about more than aesthetics.
That’s backed up in court filings from the case, as well as Trump’s own public comments.
A snapshot of the construction in February, after the East Wing was demolished to make room for a ballroom.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
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Jose Luis Magana/AP
“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One over the weekend.
He said the proposed 90,000 square-foot ballroom “essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under,” adding that the “high-grade bulletproof glass” windows would protect the facility below “from drones and … from any other thing.”
The existence of a World War II-era facility — called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) — has been an open secret for decades, especially after the government released photos in 2015 of White House officials sheltering inside on Sept. 11, 2001.
But little is known about the current status of the bunker, which CNN reported in January had been dismantled in the renovations, or what kind of structure might come to replace it. When asked on Monday to share more about the underground complex, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stayed tight-lipped.
“The military is making some upgrades to their facilities here at the White House, and I’m not privy to provide any more details on that at this time,” she said.
Trump was more forthcoming with reporters that same day, as he signed executive orders in the Oval Office, reiterating that the judge’s decision allows him to “continue building as necessary … to cover the safety and security of the White House and its grounds.”
Trump read through a handwritten note listing off the permitted upgrades.
“The roof is droneproof. We have secure air-handling systems,” Trump said. “We have bio-defense all over. We have secure telecommunications and communications all over. We have bomb shelters that we’re building. We have a hospital and very major medical facilities that we’re building … So on that we’re okay.”
For decades, little was known about the FDR-era bunker
The White House built the East Wing with an underground bomb shelter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, over concerns that the building could become the target of an aerial attack.
“This secret space featured thick concrete walls and steel-sheathed ceilings with a small presidential bedroom and bath inside,” the White House Historical Association wrote on social media in 2024. “Nearby rooms provided ventilation masks, food storage, and communications equipment.”
It has been upgraded in the decades since. On the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a number of White House officials under George W. Bush — who was in Florida at the time — took shelter there.
Former First Lady Laura Bush recounted the experience in her 2010 memoir, in which she wrote about being “hustled downstairs through a pair of big steel doors that closed behind me with a loud hiss, forming an airtight seal.”
President George W. Bush talks with Vice President Dick Cheney in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Eric Draper/The White House/Associated Press
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Eric Draper/The White House/Associated Press
“I was now in one of the unfinished subterranean hallways underneath the White House, heading for the PEOC,” she wrote. “We walked along old tile floors with pipes hanging from the ceiling and all kinds of mechanical equipment. The PEOC is designed to be a command center during emergencies, with televisions, phones, and communications facilities.”
Key administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, were also there, seated at a long conference table in a small room. The government released hundreds of photos of that day — showing officials talking on landline phones and videoconferencing on large screens — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015.
Bush wrote that the Secret Service suggested the couple spend the night in the bunker: “They showed us the bed, a foldout that looked like it had been installed when FDR was president … we both said no.”
A decade later, when Barack Obama was president, the White House undertook a major, multi-year renovation project that involved digging a massive hole beneath the Oval Office, exposing what appeared to be a tunnel underneath. The General Services Administration (GSA) denied it was bunker-related, calling it a standard revamp of the air-conditioning and electrical systems.
A digging project near the West Wing, pictured in Jan. 2011, looked to many like bunker business.
Charles Dharapak/AP
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Charles Dharapak/AP
“However, what reporters and photographers saw during the construction appeared to go well beyond that: a sprawling, multistory structure whose underground assembly required truckload after truckload of heavy-duty concrete and steel beams,” the Associated Press wrote towards the end of the project in 2012.
It noted that the White House had tried to keep that work hidden by putting up a fence around the excavation site and “ordering subcontractors not to talk to anyone and to tape over company info on trucks pulling into the White House gates.”
Many people didn’t buy the official explanation for what some media outlets came to call “The White House Big Dig.”
A 2011 New York Times report cited unnamed administration officials speculating that the effort was actually “security-related.” People did not take the GSA’s story at face value, the article added, “despite the size of the hole, the controlled silence of the construction workers and the fact that funds were allocated after Sept. 11, 2001.” A 2011 Washington Post piece put it more bluntly: “It’s a bunker, right?”
Questions about the bunker surfaced again during Trump’s first term, after the New York Times and CNN reported that the Secret Service had rushed him inside and kept him there briefly during a night of Black Lives Matter protests outside the White House in May 2020. Trump later confirmed that he had spent time in the PEOC, but denied that he’d been rushed inside — told Fox News he had gone in briefly during daytime hours “more for an inspection.”
What we know about the new construction
Still, the existence of a bunker — and plans to construct a new one — were not necessarily top of mind for people when Trump began demolishing the East Wing last fall.
Critics were quicker to call out the lack of public input and congressional authorization, the sheer scale of the proposed ballroom and concerns about environmental impact and historical preservation.
In January, as the legal battle unfolded, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the project was being undertaken with “the design, consent, and approval of the highest levels of the United States Military and Secret Service,” without elaborating.
“The mere bringing of this ridiculous lawsuit has already, unfortunately, exposed this heretofore Top Secret fact,” Trump wrote.
The National Capital Planning Commission voted to approve Trump’s ballroom plan on Thursday, days after a federal judge ordered construction to stop without authorization from Congress.
Al Drago/Getty Images
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Al Drago/Getty Images
In court filings reviewed by NPR, the Secret Service confirmed its involvement but kept details to a minimum.
In one signed declaration, Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn wrote that his agency was working with the contractor on “temporary security and safety measures around the project’s construction site,” which were not fully complete at the time.
“Accordingly, any pause in construction, even temporarily, would leave the contractor’s obligation unfulfilled in this regard and consequently hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission,” Quinn wrote, before offering to brief the judge privately on more details, “including law enforcement sensitive and/or classified information.”
In a separate filing, Trump administration officials sought to submit further details in a classified setting so as to keep “the discussion of national security concerns” off a publicly available docket.
Trump allies have been similarly vague in other public settings, including at a National Capital Planning Commission meeting in January, where Josh Fisher, the White House director of management and administration, said: “There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on.”
After a period of soliciting public comments, the commission, a government agency that meets monthly to provide planning guidance for D.C.’s federal land and buildings, held its approval vote on a tweaked version of Trump’s ballroom plan this week. It gave it the green light, despite the judge’s order just days earlier.
A Louisiana sheriff was indicted Wednesday over her office’s role in a notorious jailbreak that sparked outrage last year. The brazen escape saw 10 inmates flee from a New Orleans jail, prompting a massive manhunt involving hundreds of officers from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson faces a 30-count grand jury indictment, charging her with malfeasance, obstruction of justice and falsifying public records. Although Hutson is not accused of helping the inmates break out of jail — through a hole behind a toilet — a state investigation found her poor management of the jail led to their escape. All of the inmates were eventually recaptured after a monthslong search.
“While Sheriff Hutson did not personally open the doors of the jail for the escapees, her refusal to comply with basic legal requirements and to take even minimal precautions in the discharge of her duties directly contributed to and enabled the escape,” Murrill said in a statement.
Huston’s office did not immediately respond to phone calls, text messages and emails seeking comment. Court records did not list a personal attorney for Huston, who lost her reelection campaign and is set to leave office on Monday.
The sheriff told CBS News in an exclusive interview last August that understaffing and “major design flaws” at the jail played a significant part in the inmates’ escape. At the time, she said those flaws at the Orleans Parish Justice Center “make it unsafe for those who are housed here and make it unsafe for those who work here.”
In a farewell address Tuesday, Hutson said her office faced numerous challenges and said the jailbreak “tested us to the limit.” She added her office “responded with professionalism, urgency and resilience, and we came out stronger because of it.”
Court records show bond for Hutson was set at $300,000 and that she was ordered to turn in her passport and not leave the state. Bianka Brown, the chief financial officer of the sheriff’s office, was also indicted on 20 similar charges. She did not immediately respond to phone calls and text messages sent to numbers associated with her.
Both Hutson and Brown turned themselves into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center and have been released on bond, CBS affiliate WWL reported.
The escapees left behind graffiti that read “To Easy LoL” after crawling through a hole behind a jail toilet and scaling a barbed wire fence. The jail did not realize the inmates were missing for more than seven hours.
State officials and some city leaders accused Hutson of poor management and criticized her for not alerting police and other authorities in a timely manner. Hutson initially blamed political opponents for being behind the jailbreak without providing any evidence to support her claim. She also said faulty door locks enabled the escape and added she had been seeking funding to improve the jail’s ailing infrastructure.
The Orleans Parish jail system had been plagued by violence, corruption and dysfunction for decades and was placed under federal oversight in 2013. But problems persisted despite tens of millions of dollars in investment and the opening of a new jail facility in 2015.
Federally appointed monitors warned of the jail’s inadequate staffing, lax supervision and a skyrocketing number of “internal escapes” in the two years leading up to the jailbreak.
The House on Wednesday narrowly adopted a Republican budget blueprint that would allow the G.O.P. to blow past Democratic opposition and pour an additional $70 billion into immigration enforcement through the remainder of President Trump’s second term.
The measure is a crucial step in Republicans’ plan to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, ending a shutdown that has lasted for nearly 11 weeks.
Republicans pushed through the plan, which the Senate adopted last week, on a party-line vote of 215 to 211, with one independent lawmaker voting “present.” That set the stage for the G.O.P. to begin working on a special budget measure, shielded from a filibuster in the Senate, to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the two agencies charged with carrying out the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“This is the moment we take the keys, and we say, no more of this nonsense,” said Representative Jodey C. Arrington, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Budget Committee. “And we open up the people’s government and we restore the safety and security of the American people.”
The budget plan — which stalled in the House for more than five hours as Republicans fought among themselves over measures on agriculture and ethanol that had nothing to do with immigration — was part of the two-track strategy that Republicans agreed to earlier this month to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding lapsed on Feb. 14.
Democrats had refused to fund the department without new restrictions on federal immigration agents’ conduct, and Republicans had refused to agree to any. Then last month, Senate Republicans struck a deal with Democrats to allow the spending measure for the Department of Homeland Security to pass with no funding for or restrictions on immigration enforcement. The G.O.P. would then seek to fund ICE and C.B.P. through a process known as reconciliation, which exempts certain budget bills from a filibuster and allows them to pass the Senate on a simple-majority vote.
Approval of the budget plan was a crucial first step for Republicans to begin the reconciliation process, which will deprive Democrats of the ability to block the bill funding ICE and C.B.P. President Trump has directed Congress to pass that measure by June 1.
The spending bill to fund the rest of the department, which has passed the Senate twice without objection, has remained stalled in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson has yet to bring it to the floor, even as the White House has urged swift passage.
Several rank-and-file House Republicans said they would not vote for the spending bill without seeing progress on the bill funding immigration enforcement. It was not clear whether adoption of the budget blueprint would be enough to sway them.
The budget resolution would allow the two Senate committees that oversee immigration enforcement agencies to write legislation that increases government spending by up to $70 billion each. Republican leaders have said that they expect the total spending amount to be closer to $70 billion in total.
Democrats attacked Republicans for giving more money to immigration agencies that already received a large fund as part of Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill. They argued that such money would be better utilized to address Americans’ concerns over affordability and health care.
“Republicans refuse to address the rising costs that Americans are dealing with because this administration refuses to put the people first,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington. “Americans of every political stripe do not want more money to go to ICE’s slush fund.”
Some rank-and-file Republicans had been concerned about such attacks, and they sought to expand the scope of the budget bill to include priorities that they argued would be felt more directly by most Americans.
But the White House and congressional Republican leaders rebuffed those efforts, worried that adding other priorities to the bill would slow its passage and could prolong a record shutdown.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States.
Until now these individuals have been accorded temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries.
Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then — Republican and Democrat — has embraced TPS. President Trump, however, is trying to end it.
On Wednesday his solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration’s decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency’s decision-making either. Pressed by the court’s three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything.
“None of those procedural steps required by the statue are reviewable. That’s your position?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“Correct,” responded Sauer.
“What you’re basically saying is that Congress wrote a statute for no purpose,” Sotomayor said.
Justice Elena Kagan noted that under the statute the secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the U.S. State Department about what the conditions are in those countries that people have been forced to flee. What if she didn’t do that at all, Kagan asked. Or what if she asked, but the response from the State Department came back: “Wasn’t that baseball game last night great!”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions?
To all these hypotheticals, Solicitor General Sauer stood firm. That prompted this from Sotomayor: “Now, we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy, dirty, and disgusting s-hole country.’ I’m quoting him. He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America. I don’t see how that one statement is not a prime example … showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”
Sauer pushed back, noting that Kristi Noem, the then-DHS secretary, had not mentioned race at all. That prompted this response from Justice Jackson, the only Black woman on the court, “So the position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet that we aren’t allowed to look at all the context.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration’s position. Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? she asked.
Sauer appeared to concede the point.
Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration’s review as “a sham.”
“The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president’s racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Pipoly said. “The secretary herself described people from Haiti” and from other non-white countries as “killers, leeches, saying, ‘We don’t want them, not one,’” while “simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief for white and only white South Africans.”
That was too much for Justice Samuel Alito who asked Pipoly, “Do you think that if you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a line-up, do you think you could say those people are … non-white?”
An uncomfortable Pipoly resisted categorizing each group until Alito got to his own roots.
“How about southern Italians?” Alito inquired, prompting laughter in the courtroom.
Responded Pipoly: “Certainly 120 years ago when we had our last wave of European immigration, southern Italians were not considered white. … Our concept of these things evolves over time.”
At the end of Wednesday’s court session, one thing was clear: President Trump may be furious at some of the conservative justices he appointed for invalidating his tariffs, but for the most part, he is getting his way. Especially in light of the court’s 6-to-3 decision, announced Wednesday, which effectively guts what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act, once celebrated as a signature achievement of American Democracy.
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