Senate parliamentarian rejects $1 billion ballroom funding in GOP budget bill

A $1 billion ballroom plan tied to President Donald Trump’s White House project collided with one of the Senate’s most powerful gatekeepers, putting a flashy piece of the GOP agenda at risk of being rewritten or dropped.

Senate Democrats said Saturday night that Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough had determined the ballroom provision did not comply with budget rules, a setback for Republican efforts to tuck the money into a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. The broader package is aimed mainly at immigration enforcement and homeland security spending, but the ballroom language has become the most politically combustible part of it.

The fight centers on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom planned for the White House campus, after the White House East Wing had already been demolished for the project. Democrats said the ballroom money was outside the jurisdiction of the committee that wrote the language and violated the Byrd rule, which bars extraneous material from reconciliation bills. Republicans said the money was for security upgrades, not for non-security construction, and argued the ballroom itself would be paid for with private donations.

The parliamentarian’s ruling is not legally binding, but in reconciliation bills it is rarely ignored because it determines what can pass with a simple majority. Senate Democrats said the decision showed the ballroom provision was too broad and not properly connected to the budget measure. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats had fought back against what he called an effort to make taxpayers foot the bill for Trump’s “billion-dollar ballroom,” and said they would be ready to do so again if Republicans tried to revive the language.

There was skepticism inside the Republican Party before the ruling. Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said on May 11 that he expected the ballroom money might be removed before the bill reached the floor and said the project should be financed with private donations. Other Republicans raised questions after a closed-door briefing by Secret Service Director Sean Curran, and a memo circulated to senators reportedly broke the $1 billion into pieces, including $220 million to harden the White House complex, $180 million for a visitors screening facility, $175 million for training, and another $175 million to enhance security for Secret Service protectees.

Supporters of the spending framed it as a response to rising danger. In a May 7 letter, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Curran called the money “critical funding” because of what they described as an unprecedented increase in threats against the president and other public officials. They cited the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month and a shooting near the National Mall earlier this week.

If the ruling holds, Republicans will have to rewrite the provision or abandon it. If they try again, Democrats are likely to challenge it once more, keeping the ballroom fight at the center of a larger battle over Trump’s legacy and the limits of party-line lawmaking.