The entire East Wing of the White House will be demolished “within days,” according to two Trump administration officials.
The demolition is a significant expansion of the ballroom construction project from what President Donald Trump said this summer.
“It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump said on July 31. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”
The New York Times first reported the extent of the demolition.
A White House official told NBC News the “entirety” of the East Wing would eventually be “modernized and rebuilt” while acknowledging the process is fluid.
“The scope and the size of the ballroom project have always been subject to vary as the process develops,” the official told NBC News.
Receiving a significant expansion during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency in 1942, the East Wing is connected to and part of the White House complex, and it has typically been used by the first lady and her staff.
Construction on the ballroom began last month. Trump has said it will hold up to 900 people, and last week he said the total price would be about $250 million, which he said he and private donors will pay for. However, on Wednesday, Trump said the ballroom's price is "about $300 million."
A White House official told NBC News via email that "all the historical components of the East Wing, such as elements from [Rosalynn] Carter’s original Office of the First Lady, have been preserved and stored under the supervision of the White House Executive Residence and the National Park Service with support from the White House Historical Association. Plans are in place for future use."
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit agency created by Congress to help preserve historic buildings, warned administration officials in a letter Tuesday that the planned ballroom “will overwhelm the White House itself.”
“We respectfully urge the Administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes,” Carol Quillen, the National Trust’s CEO, said in a statement.
The White House argues that it hasn’t been required to submit plans for review by the National Capital Planning Commission because only demolition — and not technically construction — has begun.
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission and D.C. State Historic Preservation Office are the regulatory agencies that would traditionally be involved in greenlighting any major renovations at the White House, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But the White House is ultimately exempt from their binding authority and approval process, the person said, because of what a symbolically unique property 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is.
The Trust for the National Mall oversees the private donations given to support the ballroom project as the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. The design and construction are being led by Trump himself, alongside McCrery Architects.
So far, Trump has made significant changes to the Rose Garden, the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and the Palm Room. He also installed two gigantic flagpoles on the property.
Some experts have questioned how transparent the administration has been about the ballroom construction project.
Bryan Clark Green, an architectural historian and former appointee to the National Capital Planning Commission, said in an interview: “From a norms and customs side, administrations have always gone through that [approval] process to get buy-in and to make sure the public sees the process and isn’t surprised by the design. The whole point of the review process is to improve the design.
“So you had the [Trump] statement over the summer that this will not affect the East Wing at all. But, obviously, it is. A public process would have avoided that kind of shock and surprise.”
Priya Jain, a member of the Society of Architectural Historians, said: “It seems like they [the White House] plan to submit their proposal to the National Capital Planning Commission. However, in regular federal projects, deliberation happens before anything is demolished.”
Construction plans weren’t submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission in advance, but a White House official claimed they will be “soon when it is time.”
It’s unclear what that time frame is. The NCPC is affected by the government shutdown.
Construction crews were seen this week ripping down the East Wing facade, prompting criticism from Democrats, historians and even some Republicans.
The White House called the uproar “manufactured outrage” by "unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies" in a news release Tuesday.
The critics, the White House said, were "clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.”
The release called the planned ballroom “a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”
It noted that numerous other presidents have had renovations and construction work done at the site. “FACT: For more than a century, U.S. Presidents have been renovating, expanding, and modernizing the White House to meet the needs of the present day,” it said, pointing to specific examples.
Trump held a dinner at the White House last week to thank donors to the project.
Comcast Corp., the parent company of NBCUniversal, was included on a list of top donors. It is unclear how much Comcast and other donors have contributed; Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, agreed last month to donate $22 million to the project in a settlement of a court case Trump had brought against the online video platform.
