Executive Office of the President signed a White House ballroom donor contract shielding donors and exempting conflict-of-interest rules

On October 8, 2025, the White House, the National Park Service, and the Trust for the National Mall — the nonprofit managing donations for President Donald Trump's planned $400 million White House ballroom — signed a contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations for the project. The agreement was finalized less than two weeks before demolition crews began tearing down the East Wing to make way for construction, on October 20, 2025.

Provisions throughout the contract bar the signatories from revealing the identities of anonymous donors, and a review process for detecting conflicts of interest with the Park Service and Interior Department makes no mention of applying the same scrutiny to the president, other White House officials, or the executive departments he oversees. Taken together, the terms allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to the project while exempting the White House from key conflict-of-interest safeguards. Many of the project's known donors — including Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and Google — collectively hold billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration.

The contract itself was not made public at signing, and the Park Service and Interior Department did not fulfill a subsequent public-records request for it. White House officials defended the arrangement, saying that not posting the agreement was standard practice for contracts involving the executive residence and that donor anonymity was standard for significant projects; a spokesperson said the project advances "at no taxpayer expense." Trump has said the administration has raised about $300 million for the ballroom.

Updates

2026-04-21 — Washington Post disclosed the contract's contents after a FOIA lawsuit forced its release [1, 3]

The Washington Post reported on the contract's contents after obtaining it through the government watchdog Public Citizen, which had sued and won a court order for its release. "The Trump administration's failure to disclose this contract was flatly unlawful," said Wendy Liu, the Public Citizen attorney who served as lead counsel.