Construction crews work on a rooftop in Georgetown in June. President Donald Trump said Friday he will ask Congress for $2 billion to make improvements in Washington.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that he would request funding from Congress to beautify Washington, the latest development in his plans to dramatically remake a city he says was overrun with crime and decay before he intervened.
Trump said Friday morning that he would seek $2 billion for the cleanup. When a reporter asked him about the funding several hours later in the Oval Office, he said he “wouldn’t even know where to spend” that amount.
“It’s going to be not a lot of money,” Trump said Friday afternoon.
Trump said the administration would improve light fixtures and roads within a 3-mile radius of the Capitol and the White House, as he accused D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of failing to keep the city clean. His focus on public safety — including the false claim that he has solved local crime — has evolved into an all-out effort to transform the city where he lives into a place reminiscent of his private golf clubs.
“We’re going to have this place beautified within a period of 12 months,” said the president, while wearing a red cap emblazoned with the message: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
Trump later promised in the Oval Office to use the powers of the federal government to wage war on the vermin that have long vexed D.C. residents.
“It was a crime-infested rathole,” Trump said of the city. “And they do have a lot of rats. We’re getting rid of them, too. And we’ve made a lot of progress.”
The project would mark an extraordinary intervention in the management of the nation’s capital. The White House has already flooded the streets with National Guard troops from across the country and ordered his staff to take over the municipal police force. Those troops will “soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons,” the Pentagon said in a statement Friday.
The campaign has backed top D.C. officials into a corner. They have spent the last six months trying to placate the president and GOP members of Congress to avoid his ire. Now, with little leverage, they are struggling to determine their role and how to limit the president’s intervention in city affairs.
Because of D.C.’s unique status as outlined in the Constitution, Congress has final say over its laws and budgets. Trump also has the power to take temporary control of the city’s police force if he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
Prospects for congressional approval of the new funding are unclear. Democrats have widely criticized Trump’s intervention in D.C., and fiscal conservatives within the president’s own party have raised concerns about adding to the deficit. The most likely path would be to tuck the funding in a government funding package that lawmakers are debating ahead of the end of the fiscal year, which concludes Sept. 30.
The pressure on Congress to approve the funding for Trump’s aesthetic ambitions comes as the legislative body is withholding more than $1 billion from D.C.’s local budget raised by local taxpayers.
Trump, a longtime real estate developer and golf club owner, has taken a special interest in the aesthetics of Washington. He mentioned rusting light poles with mismatched lenses, and he promised to fix the roads with “beautiful, well done asphalt.” On Thursday during a visit to a U.S. Park Police facility in Southeast Washington, Trump also promised to improve the grass in D.C. parks to resemble Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia or his own clubs. The administration will work with Clark Construction, which is also leading construction of the White House ballroom, on the improvements, he said.
Trump has cast D.C.’s elected leadership as inept as he moves to reshape the city. While some of Trump’s efforts have required him to invoke laws to assert his authority — as he did when he ordered the federalization of the D.C. police department — other priorities are already in his control.
Most of the parkland that Trump has described as dirty and in need of repair is federal property: swaths of the National Mall, parks outside the White House and Capitol, and grassy lawns in Dupont Circle and in the heart of downtown Washington have long been his to clean up.