President Donald Trump’s long-term vision to expand the White House’s entertaining capacity is going to have short-term impacts on Americans seeking to visit the complex now.
A residence, a workplace and a museum, the White House is the only home of a head of state in the world that is also open to the public most days. Hundreds of thousands of people enter the People’s House for free tours each year, gaining firsthand access to the Blue Room, where President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom, the Red Room, where first lady Dolley Madison entertained, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held his radio “fireside chats.”
But that could stop next month when construction on Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom – which will overtake the current footprint of the East Wing – gets underway. Tour bookings have been halted temporarily, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN, because construction will directly impact the current tour screening process and entry point.
With the exception of visiting heads of state, guests arriving at the White House for receptions, dinners and tours currently enter through Sherman Park, just behind the US Treasury building, and get screened by US Secret Service in a temporary visitor center. Multiple previous efforts over the last two decades to build a permanent structure have failed to get the necessary funding from Congress or the Department of Interior to proceed. Once visitors have passed through checkpoints and security, they enter through the East Wing, which was first constructed in 1902 and took its current structure during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.
Trump’s ballroom is expected to expand out beyond the site of the current East Wing, which is home to the Office of the First Lady, the Military Office, the Visitors Office and the Office of Legislative Affairs.
A spokesperson for first lady Melania Trump — whose office oversees tours — downplayed the disruption, saying only new tour bookings have been paused.
“There have been zero tour cancelations due to the addition of the State Ballroom. Instead, new tour bookings were paused proactively while a collaborative group of White House, U.S. Secret Service, National Park Service, and Executive Residence staff work to determine the best way to ensure public access to the White House as this project begins and for the duration of construction,” Nick Clemens said in a statement to CNN.
“The White House tour route has evolved over presidencies, and we look forward to near-term updates about the new State Ballroom. The President and First Lady remain committed to continuing the tradition of public access to the People’s House in the present and for the future.”
Officials are currently assessing how to move the screening process and likely truncate the tour while still capturing the essence of a White House visit during the construction.
The scope of construction, a source familiar with the situation told CNN, is “going to be invasive to what is the norm now [for tours]. They’re going to have to put up temporary screening mechanisms. They’re going to have to reroute the parameter of Secret Service protection.”
In a reimagined route, the source said, visitors would miss entering by the first lady’s office, walking through the East Colonnade past the family theater, and the area known as “Booksellers Hall” where state dinner guests are received. But there will likely still be access to the home’s most historic spaces: the State Floor, State Dining Room, Red Room, Blue Room, Green Room, East Room, Library, Vermeil Room, and Diplomatic Reception Room.
The adjustments may also impact how many tickets are administered.
“The tours are not going to be canceled,” the source added. “They’re going to find a solution – but I think they’re going to probably have to manage the numbers that come in and out now. There may have to be some changes.”
Construction is expected to get underway in September and is “expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term,” according to a statement from the White House that included renderings of the new structure, which is nearly double the square footage of the main White House mansion. Trump has said that he, along with other donors, will privately fund the project, which is currently projected to cost $200 million.
Officials from the White House, Secret Service, National Park Service, and Executive Residence staff are working quickly to reassess the tour flow, another source familiar with the matter said, but changes to White House tours have taken years to enact in other circumstances. During the Biden administration, first lady Jill Biden unveiled a multimillion-dollar upgrade to the tour to make it more accessible and interactive, including new digital screens in the East Colonnade, a three-dimensional model of the White House’s architectural transformations over the years, and tactile “reader rails” with detailed information about each room on the tour.
Those upgrades took more than two years to come to fruition in close coordination with the East Wing, the National Park Service, which oversees all improvements to the White House, the White House Historical Association, the White House curator’s office, and executive residence staff.
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