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Trump Ballroom Builder Given $17M On No-Bid Contract For Side Project
April 29, 2026
Posted 3 hours ago by
By Sharon Zhang This article was originally published by Truthout “They just took the cover page of my estimate and just added a bunch of money,” the original cost estimator said. The Trump administration has covertly granted the private company building President Donald Trump’s ballroom project a no-bid federal contract for a project near the White House, and then quintupled its value from its original price estimate, new reporting shows.
The New York Times reports that, in January, the Trump administration granted Clark Construction a contract to repair two fountains in Lafayette Park, which sits across from the White House, and they did so without posting the grant on public databases. The National Park Service (NPS) project, which will be paid for with federal money, was originally estimated to cost 3.3 million, according to calculations done in 2022 under the Biden administration. But the Trump administration inflated that to 11.9 million, and then later tacked on provisions to raise the value to 17.4 million, internal NPS documents showed. read more
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