The White House is ramping up its sales pitch for security funding related to President Donald Trump’s ballroom project, but the administration is struggling for now to squash skepticism among Senate Republicans.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran met with GOP senators at a closed-door lunch Tuesday and walked through a $1 billion funding request for his agency, providing a handout to GOP senators breaking down the funding.
Several lawmakers said afterward they needed more details.
“There are still a lot of questions,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said after the lunch, summing up the feelings of many of his GOP colleagues.
The document given to Senate Republicans and obtained by POLITICO specifies that $220 million of the funding would go toward the ballroom project. That money, according to the document, would be used for “investments in the above and below ground hardening requirements of the East Wing Modernization Project,” including bulletproof glass and other security upgrades.
“Importantly, as the legislative text makes explicit, none of these funds will be used to support non-security improvements at the White House,” the document adds.
The rest of the $1 billion in funding would go toward several other priorities, including a new White House visitor screening facility, better protection for federal officials and Secret Service officer training.
The money is part of a larger immigration enforcement funding package that would provide more than $70 billion to immigration enforcement agencies. But it’s the Secret Service funding — and the portion that can go toward parts of the White House renovation project — that is creating a headache for GOP leaders as they try to quickly get the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted that most of the $1 billion is “going to be used for other purposes — training facilities or technology, lots of other things that law enforcement … needs to ensure that they keep our president and other top officials safe.” He can lose three up GOP senators on the expected party-line vote, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a possible tie.
But so far Thune has several more than that who are saying they still have questions.
“I think they’ll probably have to come out with more detail,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Trump ally. “Bottom line is, people want to be supportive. They want security for the president. But they want more detail.”
Kennedy said that he is drafting an amendment that would offset the Secret Service money by reducing the overall size of the reconciliation package from $72 billion to $71 billion. He brought up the idea during Tuesday’s closed-door lunch.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) indicated afterward that she still needed more details, adding that some of the requests “should have been in the president’s budget” and gone through the standard bipartisan spending process.
Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) also told reporters after the lunch that he needs more specifics from the White House.
Going into the lunch, Curtis noted that Trump has said the estimated $400 million ballroom would be privately financed: “It was one thing when private dollars were doing it. If you’re asking me for a billion dollars, I have some really hard questions.”
