Construction of a White House ballroom continues on Aug. 18,
2026, three days before a court-ordered deadline to halt construction
unless Congress authorizes it.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Is it illegal for the president to spend ‘patriotic’ donations on a White House ballroom or anything else?
The fate of President Donald Trump’s estimated US$400 million White House ballroom
may hinge on the little-known and somewhat surprising rules as to when
the federal government and its agencies can accept privately donated
funds.
As a scholar of nonprofit and tax-exempt law who has studied for
decades how the law governs deductible charitable contributions, including those to the government,
I find that this appeals court decision calls for an explanation of the
role that such private donations may play in any federal government
project or activity. An intricate statutory dance is required for
taxpayers to make donations to particular government agencies or for
particular government purposes.
Giving to the government
You may not realize that you can make potentially tax-deductible contributions to the federal government itself. An official website lists almost two dozen programs,
including the National Endowment for for the Humanities, the National
Arboretum and AmeriCorps, to which U.S. citizens can donate.
But such donations are allowed to government agencies only if
Congress has granted the agency statutory authority to receive those
funds.
In this context, according to the reasoning of the majority in the
appeals court case, that means spending donated funds to preserve the
East Wing would have been automatically allowed because it stood on a national park and the National Parks Service is an agency that individuals can donate to;
spending those funds to build something new to replace that structure
would not be allowed unless Congress had authorized the project.
What’s more, the Bureau of Fiscal Services – the central bank account and financial manager for the federal government – explains
that it “may accept gifts donated to the United States Government” and
that the account for such gifts, which dates back to 1843, was
established “to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing
to express their patriotism to the United States.” Such gifts, however,
are subject to restrictions.
An excavator clears rubble after the East Wing of the White House was demolished on Oct. 23, 2025.Eric Lee/Getty Images
Statutory restrictions
Since 1982, a provision of the United States Code, the official
codification of all the nation’s general and permanent federal statutes,
has required that these “patriotic” donations be devoted exclusively to
reducing the national debt.
By law, federal agencies cannot augment congressional appropriations. The Miscellaneous Receipts Act
requires that “an official or agent of the Government receiving money
for the Government from any source shall deposit the money in the
Treasury as soon as practicable without deduction for any charge or
claim.”
Despite this seemingly absolute language, government agencies are
permitted to accept gifts of money or other property when – and to the
extent – they are given explicit statutory authority.
But any money must be spent only as Congress directed in establishing
the agency mission. The mission of the National Park Service is the
conservation and preservation of the land and structures under its
jurisdiction.
In contrast, the White House does not
have this authority. Its own website states that it “is unable to
accept cash, checks, bonds … or other monetary equivalents” as gifts
from private citizens.
The two judges in the majority concluded that neither the National Park Service, which is the steward for the national park
on which the White House stands, nor Trump himself had satisfied all
the statutory requirements needed to undertake building of the
above-ground ballroom. It did not block work on an underground military bunker the Trump administration began renovating after it demolished the East Wing in October 2025.
Crucial to this conclusion was a statute
declaring, “A building or structure shall not be erected on any
reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the
District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”
“We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President
unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial
portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and
American taxpayers paid
for,” the majority opinion says. “Until now.”
Satisfying 2 statutes
The Trump administration has pointed to two possible statutes it says provides the necessary authority to do that.
One involves the purposes for which the National Park Service can spend its funds, including privately donated funds. The other grants the president the ability to spend funds
for, among other items, “the care, maintenance, repair, alteration,
refurnishing, [and] improvement” of the executive residence at the White
House – funds that “are authorized to be appropriated each fiscal
year.”
The majority explained that authority for the president to construct
the ballroom requires satisfying both of those statutes; neither alone
suffices.
And it rejected the reliance on the National Park Service provision
alone. That statute limits use of the service’s funds, in the words of
the majority, to “the identified purposes of conservation and
preservation.”
In particular, the majority ruled, the provision does not authorize
the construction of a new building. Further, it held, the National Park
Service provision cannot authorize the president to lead the project;
only the provision related to the executive residence can do that.
As to the executive residence provision, the majority opinion
explains that it “does not expressly grant the President any independent
authority.”
Instead, the majority held, the president must rely on “an
accompanying appropriation.” The court found no such accompanying
appropriation.
This article was updated on Aug. 21, 2026, with news about the action taken by Chief Justice Roberts.
Deciding which causes to support can be overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could get trusted information about philanthropy and nonprofits in one place?
That place is the “Giving Today” newsletter. As The Conversation’s Philanthropy + Nonprofits editor, I am fortunate to work with my counterparts at the Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Associated Press to produce this weekly email.
Every week, we team up to send a newsletter that brings together the best of our coverage on these important issues, plus useful articles from other news outlets.
In January 2012, Nina Keita
emailed Jeffrey Epstein to let him know she’d booked the ministerial
suite at the Hôtel Ivoire for his stay in Abidjan. As the name suggests,
the suite, with its panoramic views of the Ébrié Lagoon and its
tasteful African wood carvings, was intended for high-ranking government
visitors like Nelson Mandela, Hillary Clinton, and Keita’s uncle, the
president of Cote d’Ivoire. Epstein, apparently, was close enough.
He responded that he hoped “to seee [sic] very pretty girls there.” Keita confirmed, “You will!”
The two had likely met when Keita moved to New York seven years
earlier to work as a model. Epstein had invited her to visit his
Manhattan townhome and fly on his private jet, fostering a relationship
that would prove instrumental when he began traveling regularly to the
African continent: Senegal, Mali, and Gabon in 2011; Cote d’Ivoire in
2012; Morocco twice in 2015. Between 2000 and 2016, he made plans to
travel to Africa at least fifteen times. Even when he wasn’t there
physically, he kept his fingers on its pulse: Searching for “Africa” in
the Epstein files yields more than 5,600 results, including regional
financial bulletins from the World Bank, foreign policy updates from his
buddy the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, and investment ideas for
the continent from Silicon Valley types.
What drew him there? During his 2012 visit to Abidjan, Keita and the
interior minister planned for him to join a “private night” at the
minister’s penthouse: “He knows what you like,” Keita wrote, four years
after Epstein was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution. But
it wasn’t women alone that lured him to the continent. Keita also
arranged for Epstein to meet with her uncle, Cote d’Ivoire’s president,
at least twice, as well as the country’s minister of mines, petrol, and
energy. Later, she helped him broker a security agreement between Israel
and Cote d’Ivoire, after which the West African country acquired
Israeli-made surveillance technology. Returning the favors, Epstein
advised Keita on business ideas, introduced her to a Swiss bank advisor
to help realize her “goals,” and connected her with an American
philanthropic consultant to fund health and education programs in her
motherland.
This was how things worked in Epstein’s world, not just in Africa but
across the globe: Young women procured through the same networks in
which business deals were struck, lofty political connections
cultivated, and philanthropic projects funded. Yet there was something unique about his relations to and within Africa.
When I first searched the Epstein files for mentions of Africa, the
emails and texts I found churned with all the desire and revulsion a
European settler might have felt in traversing the “dark continent” a
century earlier. But by the time I reached the files’ end—if indeed one
can ever “finish” sifting through 3.5 million pages of documents,
180,000 images, and 2,000 videos—I suspected my initial conception of
Epstein was wrong, or at least incomplete. That his real position might
not be as obvious as “imperialist” or “conqueror” but something more
geopolitically specific: a role that required history to elucidate, and
that explained a man I thought the media had already covered in
excruciating, exhaustive detail in a new light.
Like the treaty-hunters and financiers of colonial and
post-independence Africa, Epstein fashioned himself as a modern-day
power broker. For more than fifteen years, he sought out local and
international elites who dreamed of exploiting Africa’s resources, away
from public oversight and apathetic to public benefit. There, under the
long shadow of colonial rule, Epstein cultivated clout the way he
preferred: through proximity rather than through holding office or
leading a C-suite; through personal relations rather than institutional
affiliation. In Africa, he wouldn’t get rich quick, but he would bring
together influential figures who might not have otherwise met, people
who might do him a favor in return—people who might, together, bend the
continent’s fate to their whims.
Perhaps in the beginning, Epstein dreamed of enriching himself
directly off Africa’s resources. He chased a crude oil venture with
Equatorial Guinea’s vice president, for instance, and tried to access
$80 billion in frozen Libyan assets after the 2011 uprising against
Gaddafi. Neither scheme worked out, so he returned to trading in his
most reliable investment: the introduction. To that end, Epstein wanted
to know: Did Rød-Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat, want to meet the prime
minister of Ivory Coast? Could Larry Summers, former U.S. treasury
secretary, make “some small time” to meet with Ivory Coast’s finance
minister? Did Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, want to meet
the heads of state of Senegal, Ivory Coast, or various “Middle East
friends”? Did Tom Pritzker, head honcho at Hyatt, want to scout out
hotel opportunities at Dakar’s brand-new airport?
Across nationalities, generations, and political systems, what united these brokers was the impunity with which they operated.
Just as he opened doors in Africa when it suited him, he shut them
when it didn’t. In June 2011, he heard from Melanie Walker, whom he’d
approached twenty years earlier at a hotel lobby in New York because
he’d found her attractive. Now a deputy director at the Gates
Foundation, she pitched him a project to improve urban sanitation in
Dakar. His pals in the Senegalese government weren’t impressed. Her
plans reeked of “the colonial masters telling ys [sic] what we
need and not really listening,” he relayed. When Walker asked to meet
his contacts directly to discuss, Epstein shot her down. “No chance,” he
wrote.
In controlling entry to rarefied rooms, Epstein was occupying a role
older than some African nations. In the nineteenth century, “freelance”
brokers allowed European metropoles to acquire large swathes of the
continent without having to expend their own soldiers or money. Alfred
Beit, a German diamond buyer at the Kimberley fields from 1875 onward,
helped finance Cecil Rhodes’ chartered company that took what is now
Zimbabwe. The German explorer Carl Peters, whose own government refused
to back him, sailed for East Africa in 1884 anyway, returning with
treaties from chiefs of the interior. Presented with a fait accompli,
Bismarck chartered Peters’ private society and German East Africa
followed. The freelancer had birthed a colony.
African independence only solidified the broker’s role. More than
before, Washington, Paris, and Moscow needed access to the new leaders
of economies still built to ship raw commodities to Western ports. And
African rulers, their newfound power resting uneasily on administrative
systems turned skeletal by the sudden departure of colonial personnel,
were eager for allies with military, financial, and moral might.
Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-American diamond dealer, proposed in
the 1960s that Washington buy Congolese diamonds for its strategic
stockpile—with him acting as middleman, of course. He then spent three
decades encouraging Western backing of the autocratic Mobutu, who
returned the favor by granting Tempelsman the concession to a vast
copper and cobalt mine. In the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi businessman Adnan
Khashoggi converted the proceeds from his arms sales into an
infrastructure of hospitality: a 282-foot yacht, a DC-8 plane outfitted
with chamois and silk banquettes for entertaining, and beautiful women
hired to “liven up” business functions. He put these spaces and his name
behind Sudan’s “breadbasket” scheme, a Gulf-funded plan to turn the
country into a granary for the Arab world.
Across nationalities, generations, and political systems, what united
these brokers was the impunity with which they operated: none held
office, none answered to an electorate, and none could otherwise be held
accountable by the Africans whose very destinies they traded in.
Francophone West Africa birthed a class of brokers all its own. Dr.
Éric Tsimi, a scholar of Francophone African literature and culture at
Northwestern University, believes no other part of the continent remains
as tightly bound to its former colonizer. The CFA, which originally
stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique and still serves as the currency
of fourteen African nations, is pegged to the euro, facilitating trade
to the advantage of French companies. Since 1960, France has intervened
militarily in Africa at least fifty times, both through official
deployments and French mercenaries leading uprisings and coups with the
tacit approval of Paris. No wonder the region is still known as
“Françafrique.”
Even as Epstein publicly wooed some Africans, the continent repulsed him in private.
Within this tangled web, the “indigène évolué” emerges as a key
figure: literally translating to “evolved savage” in colonial-era French
(Tsimi prefers the translation of “elite magician”), the term referred
to an African who’d assimilated to European values through Western
education, language, and dress. The businessmen, diplomats, and military
officials occupying this role were not mere representatives of colonial
authority, extracting local resources and classified intelligence on
behalf of the metropole, but people holding great power and ambition
themselves. People like Keita. And people like Karim Wade, the son of
Senegal’s former president.
Known as Senegal’s “minister of earth and sky” for leading so many
governmental departments, Wade often played tour guide on Epstein’s
travels to West Africa. He arranged meetings between Epstein and the
heads of state of Mali, Gabon, and Senegal. On the road, the pair
debated Epstein buying a mansion in Morocco (“Do not forget in the house
the harem part,” Wade wrote. “Happy to manage it.”). They discussed
turning Senegal into a global banking center and nuclear power hub, and
offshore banking contacts for Wade. (Here again, Africa’s colonial
history created a dream playing field for brokers and creative money
managers: the under-regulated havens of modern offshore finance are
overwhelmingly current or former British territories—what historians
describe as a “second empire” whereby London continued capturing global
financial flows even after losing its colonies.)
In 2013, when Wade was charged by the Senegalese government with
siphoning roughly €178 million from state coffers to—you guessed
it—offshore bank accounts, Epstein spent at least $600,000 in legal and
lobbying fees fighting for his exoneration. In various messages, Epstein
called him “the most charismatic and rational of all the africans [sic]” and “a very good guy.” (The terms “good guy” and “great guy” appear in the files 788 times.)
In his efforts to free Wade, Epstein followed in a long line of
Western brokers protecting their most valuable assets in Africa. In
1888, agents of Cecil Rhodes obtained exclusive mining rights in the
dominion of Lobengula, king of the Ndebele in what is now Zimbabwe.
Because the grant was worth only as much as the territory that Lobengula
could be said to rule, Rhodes’s chartered company fought to convince
both the Portuguese—who claimed the same area by right of prior
presence—and London’s Colonial Office that Lobengula’s authority ran
across the Shona lands to the northeast. In 1960, when the mineral-rich
province of Katanga seceded from the newly independent Congo, the
Belgian mining conglomerate that owned its copper financed the breakaway
state and bankrolled a lobbyist in New York to support its president,
Moïse Tshombe, who stood accused of complicity in the murder of Congo’s
first prime minister.
Epstein was a single man, not a conglomerate, but he marshaled
similar resources, including money, lawyers, a lobbying firm, and
contacts at the European Court of Human Rights, where he floated filing a
suit challenging Wade’s conviction on the theory that Wade’s dual
French citizenship might open a European avenue. It’s almost certain he
didn’t view any of this as a favor but an investment: Without “indigènes
évolués” like Keita and Wade, Epstein had little hope of influencing
what unfolded in West Africa—in its earth, skies, or anywhere in
between.
Even as Epstein publicly wooed some Africans, the continent repulsed
him in private. While traveling in Senegal in 2011, a friend asked what
brought him there. “Would you believe great science,” he replied. A
rhetorical question with an obvious answer: no. He clarified his real
reasons: “primitive thinking , great petrie dishes oflife [sic]”
When the Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal—one of the old-school
influencers who lubricated Epstein’s return to elite circles after his
first stint in jail—emailed him from East Africa in 2009 to say, “We are
going to photograph ourselves with the Masai in the mud hub and say we
crashed the winter White house and are posing with Obama’s relatives,”
Epstein replied, “You will be amazed by the aroma.”
He fixated on Africa’s “smells” the way nineteenth-century white
scientists obsessed over different races’ skull sizes. In a 2012
exchange with Corina Tarnita, a Harvard-educated evolutionary biologist
working in Kenya, Epstein said he’d always wanted to go to the country.
But “what about the smells?” he asked. “What smells?” Tarnita replied.
“Kenya” he answered.
The next year, he made plans to travel there. For even as he
denigrated Africa as a disgusting, desolate place, he couldn’t stay
away. “It’s not a paradox,” Tsimi told me in an interview. Africa “is
precisely the kind of terrain that racial hierarchy historically renders
exploitable.” Nor was Epstein an aberration in holding such seemingly
contradictory attitudes: Vincent Bolloré, the French billionaire whose
fortune was built largely in Africa, owns a news channel that regularly
faces sanctions and fines for inciting hatred and discrimination.
The frenzy of media attention devoted to Epstein and his misdeeds belies how his actions were, in many ways, unexceptional.
Desire and revulsion combined to create a good mercenary: Epstein
switched loyalties without hesitation, advising Africans and Westerners
alike on how to exploit the other. In a 2015 email with the subject line
“fertile land for exploration,” Epstein suggested to a former director
of the MIT Media Lab that they approach President Mugabe to create a new
Zimbabwean currency after the collapse of the local dollar, describing
the southern African country as another “great petri dish” for
experimentation. A few years later, he advised Nigerian-born investor
Jide Zeitlin on how to pressure the American government into giving him
control of mines under litigation in Congo.
How drastically did Epstein change the course of ordinary Africans’
lives? It’s a hard question to answer, in part because brokers exist to
preserve plausible deniability; the role had endured all these years to
obfuscate attribution. The archive shows Epstein opening and closing
doors. It does not establish to what extent he influenced Wade’s theft,
the 2014 Ivorian-Israeli defense agreement, or Dakar’s sanitation
failures.
Ultimately, the greatest harm that Epstein inflicted on Africa may be
in proving the old colonial tradition—of public questions settled in
private rooms—still worked. Opportunists paying attention will be
pleased: Apparently, outsiders can still divine the fates of the
continent, if only they know the right people.
The frenzy of media attention devoted to Epstein and his misdeeds
belies how his actions were, in many ways, unexceptional: from America
to Africa, sexual predation and opportunistic glad-handing are the axes
on which contemporary power turns. Even now, with Epstein gone, his
network in Africa remains alive and well. Keita is second-in-command at
Gestoci, the public company managing Côte d’Ivoire’s oil infrastructure.
She’s also married to the Minister of Employment and Social Protection,
elevating her to the highest ranks of the country’s elite. Wade was
released after three years in prison and immediately fled to Qatar, thus
avoiding paying a €150 million fine. Zeitlin, who resigned from his
role as a Fortune 500 CEO after being accused by a woman of posing as a
photographer to lure her into a relationship, now runs a private
investment company. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as a “globally
active business executive [with a] personal commitment to social justice
and educational access.”
As Western institutions retreat from the so-called “developing
world”—USAID dismantled, bilateral aid in tatters, foreign news bureaus
shuttered—the personal network economy that Epstein embodied represents
not only the past but also the future of Western engagement with these
countries. To decipher the inner and outer workings of Western
philanthropists, intellectuals, and billionaires—especially those
claiming to save humanity—following the money is no longer enough. We
need to trace the introductions, obligations, and relationships that
determine where the money moves and why.
Somewhere, an email is going out right now, vouching for a very good guy.
