President Donald Trump faces a serious new hurdle to secure taxpayer funding for his exceedingly controversial proposed White House ballroom after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against a $1 billion provision in a bill to fund his pet project.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said over the weekend that Republicans cannot include the ballroom funding provision in a larger partisan bill because it is a technical violation of Senate rules, according to the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee who released the parliamentarian’s findings.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough concluded, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley.
The administration has estimated that $220 million of the $1 billion would go toward building the new ballroom in the East Wing, which was demolished last October to make way for the new structure Trump has envisioned.
The parliamentarian in her ruling said the provision violated the Byrd rule, which is meant to curb extraneous spending in proposed budget reconciliation bills. A violation of the Byrd rule also means the provision would be subject to a 60-vote filibuster threshold, effectively killing it since Democrats are in opposition.
“The president started talking about this thing with $100 billion, then $200 billion, and he was going to pay for it,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said. “And now it’s a billion — or $100 million, $200 million — and now a billion dollars, and he wants the American people to pay for a gilded ballroom when they cannot afford to drive their kids to a soccer game.”
Some Republicans disagreed with the parliamentarian’s interpretation of Senate rules. Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, pushed back against the ruling.
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“Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Wrasse wrote on X on Saturday.
It was not immediately clear whether Republicans would be allowed under Senate rules to resubmit the provision — the budget resolution only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee,” the ruling reads.
Trump previously said that the ballroom would be privately funded and cost around $400 million. The ballooning cost has provoked open criticism from Republicans, from vulnerable moderates to hardline conservatives, in what could become a potential revolt.
Mychael Schnell and Syedah Asghar
Peggy Helman is a desk associate at MS NOW.