GOP drops Secret Service funding tied to Trump ballroom project

Senate Republicans are moving to strip a $1 billion Secret Service funding request from their immigration enforcement reconciliation bill, cutting a provision that would have helped pay for security work tied to President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom.

The change removes language that explicitly referenced the East Wing Modernization Project and would have covered above-ground and below-ground security features. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled the money could not stay in the bill as written because it funded activities outside the Judiciary Committee’s jurisdiction, giving Republican leaders a procedural reason to do what several senators already wanted politically.

That resistance matters because the ballroom has become more than an architectural fight. Multiple GOP senators objected to using taxpayer money for the project, even as the White House had signaled that including the language would amount to Congress approving the ballroom effort as a whole. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has told Republicans that both the vote count and the parliamentarian’s ruling were barriers, a sign that the party’s internal negotiations are being shaped as much by political discomfort as by budget rules.

The retreat also highlights the sharp difference between Trump’s own framing of the project and what Republican lawmakers appear willing to defend. Trump has said the ballroom will cost about $400 million, while Republicans were considering $1 billion in public funding for related security work. The scale of that request, and the effort to bury it inside a reconciliation bill focused on immigration enforcement, turned the proposal into a test of how far party leaders are willing to go to accommodate the president’s priorities.

The ballroom fight is already entangled with a separate legal challenge. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the project had not been properly authorized by lawmakers, adding another layer of doubt around a proposal that is supposed to be about modernization but has become a proxy for power, access and who gets to decide how taxpayer money is used at the White House.

For Republicans, dropping the Secret Service money preserves their reconciliation push while avoiding a direct vote on a high-profile Trump project that many in the conference do not want to own. The cut shows where the party is drawing its boundaries: keep the immigration bill moving, but leave the ballroom funding off the table.