Three months ago, the Trump administration broke ground on its highly controversial plans to add a sprawling ballroom to the White House’s East Wing.
The State Department-funded buildout attracted plenty of scrutiny from congressional inquiries, lawsuits, and the press. Just this week, a US District judge will be weighing a bid by a preservation group to grind the $400 million plans to a halt.
Meanwhile, as CNN reports, a far more discreet plan is in the works. An existing bunker, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was built in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, had to make way for the ballroom.
Plans to rebuild an underground shelter that could once again provide protection for key White House officials have been shrouded in plenty of secrecy. And given the country’s current precarious state of unrest — in large part the result of the Trump administration’s controversial actions — that’s not particularly surprising.
It sounds like a formidable installation. A source with knowledge of the matter told CNN that the new bunker will be “replaced with new technology to counter evolving threats.”
White House director of management and administration Joshua Fisher told reporters that the administration is making “necessary security enhancements,” and delivering “resilient, adaptive infrastructure aligned with future mission needs” with its plans for the ballroom.
“There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on,” he added, as quoted by CNN. “That does not preclude us from changing the above-grade structure, but that work needed to be considered when doing this project, which was not part of the [National Capital Planning Commission] process.”
The Presidential Emergency Operations Center was designed to protect officials from major attacks, including a potential nuclear explosion.
Former vice president Dick Cheney fled to the facility in the moments ahead of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, for instance. Trump also reportedly used the bunker during the 2020 George Floyd protests.
The complex was a “very complicated submarine that was built in the 1940s — a self-contained unit, [with] separate power backups, separate water backups, separate air filtration,” a source told CNN. “But all the infrastructure is 1940s infrastructure.”
A separate source confirmed to the broadcaster that “all of the subterranean structures,” including the bunker, have been gutted as well.
How much all of this will cost, and whether all of the associated expenses will actually be picked up by private donors, as president Donald Trump has assured, remains unclear.
“If you think about trying to mitigate the threats today and the threats for tomorrow, you’re really talking about emerging technologies, emerging infrastructure — stuff that may not be commercially available,” risk management executive and former US Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow told CNN. “We’re never going to get the line of sight on how much that costs.”
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