Trump's ballroom fight sheds new light on an underground White House bunker
April 3, 2026
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President Trump's dreams of a White House ballroom have highlighted what was once a relative secret: the construction of a military bunker beneath the now-demolished East Wing.
The administration
started knocking down the East Wing in October to make way for Trump's
long-desired White House ballroom, a project that will cost at least $300 million. The plan has drawn
disapproval from
members of the public and ire from architectural and conservation groups, one of which sued to block it back in December.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation this week,
when he ruled that construction of the ballroom "must stop until Congress authorizes its completion."
Yet, as the White House appeals the decision, Leon is allowing construction to continue for "the safety and security of the White House" — a nod to the administration's argument that the renovation is about more than aesthetics.
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"The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed," Trump
told reporters on Air Force One over the weekend.
He said the proposed
90,000 square-foot ballroom "essentially becomes a shed for what's being built under," adding that the "high-grade bulletproof glass" windows would protect the facility below "from drones and … from any other thing."
The existence of a World War II-era facility — called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) — has been an open secret for decades, especially after the government
released photos in 2015 of White House officials sheltering inside on Sept. 11, 2001.
But little is known about the current status of the bunker, which
CNN reported in January had been dismantled in the renovations, or what kind of structure might come to replace it. When
asked on Monday to share more about the underground complex, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stayed tight-lipped.
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Trump was more forthcoming
with reporters that same day, as he signed executive orders in the Oval Office, reiterating that the judge's decision allows him to "continue building as necessary … to cover the safety and security of the White House and its grounds."
Trump read through a handwritten note listing off the permitted upgrades.
"The roof is droneproof. We have secure air-handling systems," Trump said. "We have bio-defense all over. We have secure telecommunications and communications all over. We have bomb shelters that we're building. We have a hospital and very major medical facilities that we're building … So on that we're okay."
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The White House built the East Wing with an underground bomb shelter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, over concerns that the building could become the target of an aerial attack.
"This secret space featured thick concrete walls and steel-sheathed ceilings with a small presidential bedroom and bath inside," the White House Historical Association
wrote on social media in 2024. "Nearby rooms provided ventilation masks, food storage, and communications equipment."
It has been upgraded in the decades since. On the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a number of White House officials under George W. Bush — who was in Florida at the time — took shelter there.
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A decade later, when Barack Obama was president, the White House undertook a major, multi-year renovation project that involved digging a massive hole beneath the Oval Office, exposing what appeared to be a tunnel underneath. The General Services Administration (GSA) denied it was bunker-related, calling it a standard revamp of the air-conditioning and electrical systems.
"However, what reporters and photographers saw during the construction appeared to go well beyond that: a sprawling, multistory structure whose underground assembly required truckload after truckload of heavy-duty concrete and steel beams," the
Associated Press wrote towards the end of the project in 2012.
It noted that the White House had tried to keep that work hidden by putting up a fence around the excavation site and "ordering subcontractors not to talk to anyone and to tape over company info on trucks pulling into the White House gates."
Many people didn't buy the official explanation for what some media outlets came to call "The White House Big Dig."
A 2011
New York Times report cited unnamed administration officials speculating that the effort was actually "security-related." People did not take the GSA's story at face value, the article added, "despite the size of the hole, the controlled silence of the construction workers and the fact that funds were allocated after Sept. 11, 2001." A 2011
Washington Post piece put it more bluntly: "It's a bunker, right?"
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In court filings reviewed by NPR, the Secret Service confirmed its involvement but kept details to a minimum.
In one signed declaration, Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn wrote that his agency was working with the contractor on "temporary security and safety measures around the project's construction site," which were not fully complete at the time.
"Accordingly, any pause in construction, even temporarily, would leave the contractor's obligation unfulfilled in this regard and consequently hamper the Secret Service's ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission," Quinn wrote, before offering to brief the judge privately on more details, "including law enforcement sensitive and/or classified information."
In a separate filing, Trump administration officials sought to submit further details in a classified setting so as to keep "the discussion of national security concerns" off a publicly available docket.
Trump allies have been similarly vague in other public settings, including at a National Capital Planning Commission
meeting in January, where Josh Fisher, the White House director of management and administration, said: "There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on."
After a period of soliciting public comments, the commission, a government agency that meets monthly to provide planning guidance for D.C.'s federal land and buildings, held its approval vote on
a tweaked version of Trump's ballroom plan this week. It gave it the green light, despite the judge's order just days earlier.
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