Firm
Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job
The
National Park Service increased the value of the contract several times over
and then awarded it to Maryland-based Clark Construction, in a process that
experts said was highly unusual.
David A.
Fahrenthold Luke BroadwaterAndrea Fuller
By David
A. FahrentholdLuke Broadwater and Andrea Fuller
The
reporters reviewed dozens of pages of documents about this contract and
analyzed other contracts awarded for similar projects.
April 25,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/us/politics/lafayette-park-fountains-trump-contract.html
To build
his mammoth White House ballroom, President Trump last summer chose
Maryland-based Clark Construction. Since then, Mr. Trump has repeatedly sung
the company’s praises, even saying he wanted it to refurbish projects all over
Washington.
In
January, government documents show, the Trump administration secretly gave the
company a no-bid contract to do another job at a sharply inflated price.
The
National Park Service wanted to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette
Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The Biden administration
in 2022 had estimated the work would cost $3.3 million. But Mr. Trump’s
government agreed to pay Clark $11.9 million to do it, and later added tasks
that increased the contract to $17.4 million, the documents show.
The
agency did so without considering offers from other firms, citing a rarely used
“urgency” exception to normal open-bidding procedures usually meant for
emergencies like war or natural disasters. By law, federal agencies are
generally supposed to seek competing bids to find the vendor that provides the
best deal.
Unlike
the ballroom project, which Mr. Trump says will be funded by private donations,
the bill for the fountain repairs is being paid by the government.
On
Friday, Mr. Trump took credit for the repairs. “The first time Lafayette Park
Fountains, opposite the White House, have worked in decades,” he wrote on
social media. “My Great Honor to have funded this project (and many others!),
and helped.”
This
contract has not been previously reported. The Trump administration did not
post it in public databases of federal spending, although agencies are
typically supposed to report new contracts within three business days.
The New
York Times obtained internal Park Service documents showing how the contract
was awarded. Contracting experts said those documents revealed that the
government had repeatedly used unusual procedures to bypass competition for the
project and increase the price it expected to pay.
The Park
Service, for instance, added more than $1 million to the contract’s cost
estimate by accounting for inflation. Twice.
“They
just took the cover page of my estimate and just added a bunch of money onto
it,” said Stephen J. Kirk, an independent consultant who had estimated the cost
of the fountain repairs for the National Park Service in 2022. “I didn’t add
those extra millions on there."
The
Interior Department, which includes the Park Service, defended the contract but
declined to answer specific questions about it.
“The way
this contract was awarded is above board,” Katie Martin, a department
spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The urgency is to ensure this project is
done well ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.”
Clark
Construction has worked for the federal government for more than 80 years. In
response to questions from The Times, the firm provided a short statement that
did not answer specific questions about the ballroom or the fountain projects.
“Our
track record reflects the quality of our work and our commitment to integrity,”
the statement said. “We bid on work we are qualified to deliver and we follow
prescribed procurement processes.”
Before
last year, Clark had little overt connection to Mr. Trump, and had inked large
contracts during Republican and Democratic administrations.
Then,
last summer, Mr. Trump chose the firm to oversee one of Washington’s largest
and most secretive projects.
The
president’s ballroom plans call for a 90,000 square-foot structure on the
former site of the East Wing. He has said it will be paid for by $400 million
in private donations, and has declined to list the donors. The Times has
identified some of them.
The
president has also said that he chose the contractors and set their rates,
believing the White House grounds to be exempt from contracting rules. But he
declined to say how much he was paying them. There have been legal challenges
to the ballroom, but a federal appeals court has allowed construction to
continue, at least for now.
In
January, Mr. Trump implied to The Times that Clark had offered to build the
ballroom for free.
“They
said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,’” he said.
This
week, The Times asked the White House if Clark was indeed working for nothing.
Taylor Rogers, a spokeswoman, said she had “nothing to add” to the president’s
comments.
In fact,
Clark is being paid for its work on the White House ballroom, according to a
person who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive matter.
As the
ballroom project was getting underway, the National Park Service sought to
restart the two 1960s-era fountains in Lafayette Park. They had not worked for
nearly a decade because of aging equipment.
In
theory, this job was nothing like the ballroom project. It was outside the
White House grounds, where normal contracting rules were supposed to apply.
But soon,
government documents show that the Trump administration began taking actions to
increase the contract’s price.
First,
the Park Service estimated that the project would cost an additional 27 percent
because of inflation. Then, puzzlingly, the service increased its estimate by
another 24 percent, to again account for inflation.
By
contrast, the best-known benchmark of broader inflation, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, rose by 16 percent in the same period. A
narrower industry-specific index measuring construction prices rose by 21
percent.
Then the
Park Service increased its estimate by another 50 percent. This time, it
attributed the increase to a “schedule compression factor.”
Contracting
experts said that was unusual, too. They said that it is common to pay
contractors more for going faster, but that it is usually done by asking for
itemized costs — extra overtime, extra equipment — rather than adding such a
large flat fee.
“I’ve
never heard of such a thing,” Mr. Kirk said.
At the
same time, the documents show, officials were also building a legal
justification to restrict who would be allowed to bid on the newly lucrative
job.
They
found that while Lafayette Park was usually open to the public, it was
sometimes closed during White House state dinners, or when foreign leaders
stayed at the nearby Blair House. Those occasional closures would stop the
fountain repair work. So the Park Service said it would be necessary to hire
one of the few contractors cleared to work inside the White House security
perimeter.
That
limited the pool of potential vendors to four, including Clark. The Park
Service contacted all of them, according to two people familiar with the
contract who asked not to be named because they were not permitted to speak
publicly about the matter.
But then,
Park Service officials reversed course and simply offered the job to Clark. In
an internal memo, the Park Service justified that decision by invoking an
exemption that allows agencies to bypass competition in urgent cases.
The
service said the fountains needed to be revamped by May 2026 — at that time,
about five months away — to be ready for the country’s 250th birthday. Because
Clark already had people and equipment at the White House working on the
ballroom, the Park Service said that only that firm was in a position to go
fast enough.
“The
agency need for the supplies or services is so urgent that providing a fair
opportunity would result in unacceptable delays,” the agency found, in a memo
signed by five Park Service officials.
The Park
Service has rarely relied on that kind of urgency claim to award no-bid
contracts. An analysis of Park Service contracting data by The Times found that
over the past decade, less than 1 percent of the agency’s contract spending
relied on urgency exemptions.
Steven L.
Schooner, a professor of contracting law at George Washington University, said
that exemption was meant for cases with much more at stake than a birthday
party, even one for a country.
“No one
will die. No one’s quality of life will be diminished. There is nothing urgent
about this,” he said. “Self-imposed deadlines aren’t urgency. And lack of
planning isn’t urgency.”
Earlier
this year, The Times reported that the Trump administration had also used the
urgency exemption to justify one of several no-bid contracts given to Event
Strategies, Inc., which helped organize Mr. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on
Jan. 6, 2021.
Experts
said that contract, too, seemed to stretch the definition of “urgency.” The
administration wanted someone to provide services for an event celebrating the
new “Trump accounts” investment vehicles. The work was urgent, the officials
said, because they had decided to do it on short notice.
Documents
seen by The Times show the Lafayette fountain contract was awarded to Clark in
January. In the months after that, the government added new tasks, including
landscaping, as well as the addition of new benches and a kiosk. The additions
increased the price to more than $17 million.
That
total makes the contract one of the dozen largest known, by amount paid out
during Mr. Trump’s second term, for the National Park Service.
In the
past, the Park Service had posted details about other contracts related to
Lafayette Park: building repair, tree care, and cleaning and waxing the park's
many statues.
But it
has not posted any information about the contract with Clark. The White House
referred the question to the Park Service, and the Park Service declined to say
why.
In
January, the Park Service announced that it was hiring contractors to repair
broken fountains in nine places around Washington, including Lafayette Park. It
treated the Lafayette Park contract differently than the other eight.
The Park
Service did not use the urgency exemption to rush any of the others along, even
though they were all facing similar deadlines. Six of the other contracts were
awarded after giving “fair opportunity” to other bidders, government records
show, though only one company bid in each case. The other two were given as
no-bid contracts under an often-used program for small businesses owned by
“socially and economically disadvantaged” Americans. None went to Clark.
The Park
Service also posted all of the other contracts in public databases. Those
records show that the other fountain repairs have each cost less than the
Lafayette Park project’s $17 million price tag. It is difficult to compare the
costs directly, because each contract involves different tasks.
Two other
firms that have worked on Washington’s fountains told The Times that, among the
city’s many broken water features, the ones in Lafayette Park were considered
among the easiest to fix.
“As
fountains go, it’s not a complicated fountain,” said Dominic Shaw, whose
Texas-based company, Waterline Studios, helped refurbish the Lafayette Park
fountains in 2007.
Other
D.C. fountains are decades older, or require workers to deal with complex
arrays of nozzles or lights, slabs of hard-to-replace granite, or long cascades
of flowing water.
The
Lafayette Park project consists of two oval-shaped pools, each with two rings
that spray a circle of jets upward and toward the center of the ring. On the
list of Washington’s fountains, Mr. Shaw said, “it would be at the bottom in
terms of complexity.”
Lisa
Friedman contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
David A.
Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit
organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
Luke
Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
Andrea
Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to make sense of
complex topics.
