WHEN YOU CONSIDER all the outrageous things President Donald Trump has done in his second term, you might be tempted to think his big ballroom project doesn’t rate high on the scale of his most authoritarian offenses—that, at worst, it’s another expensive monument to his vanity; at best, it could include some features useful to national security.

No.

This is an enormous separation-of-powers problem that, if left unresolved, essentially renders one of Congress’s major functions meaningless. Put aside the president’s deep-seated desire to host state dinners in a gilded bunker and start with one basic question. How is this bunker-ballroom—which has morphed into a six-story subterranean complex complete with a military hospital, facilities for unspecified research, and a rooftop drone port—being funded?

Funny story: No one really knows!

That’s not good, especially considering the White House already has a previously secret, nuclear-proof underground facility built during the Obama administration, and Trump is steamrolling ahead to build a “ballroom” that dwarfs the actual White House in square footage. Many people should be able to tell us. Five hundred and thirty-five, to be exact, because Congress’s job is to pass legislation that says how the government spends money.

Now, you may be confused, because Trump said at the outset of the project that no taxpayer money would be used to construct the ballroom—it was instead going to be a “gift” to the country fully funded by private donors. (Hold this thought.) His exact words were that it would be “taxpayer free,” that “We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.” This turned out to be a bald-faced lie, but the gambit served its purpose: It bought him time to break ground.

As soon as mounds of dirt began piling up, Trump began making noises that finishing the ballroom would require taxpayer funds after all, specifically to pay for the accompanying national security support. Just like the “free” Qatari plane that turned out to require a bit of extra money—nothing too serious; “less than” $400 million—in order for it to be “maxed out” with security upgrades. After the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley began taking up Trump’s requests and introduced bills to set aside the required funds. Those efforts, however, failed. A bipartisan group of senators stripped ballroom funding from a spending bill after opposing taxpayer funding for the project.

In other words, Congress has already said no to taxpayer funding for the big, beautiful ballroom, and this should have been a stop order on the project. Because, again, if Congress doesn’t fund a president’s pet project, how does he get taxpayer money for it? —Amanda Carpenter in The Bulwark

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