President Donald Trump wants Americans to foot the bill for his failed Great American State Fair.
Trump was seeking an additional $10 million from Congress to cover parts of the Freedom 250 celebration, The New Republic reported on Wednesday. This would include the poorly attended fair, prayer event and large-scale, July 4 fireworks display, which was an attempt to break the world record, but has yet to be recognized by Guinness.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the ranking Democrat on the relevant Senate Appropriations subcommittee, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the Trump administration originally folded this funding request into a larger stopgap spending bill meant to keep the government running. According to Merkley, the request didn't specify a dollar amount and was justified as needed "to recoup costs associated with support of events celebrating America's semiquincentennial."
That request only deepened concerns about how the administration has been spending money on the celebration — especially given that Trump's One Big Beautiful Act already allocated $150 million last year to cover semiquincentennial costs. Most of that funding was rerouted to Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned public-private partnership that effectively supplanted America250, the bipartisan group Congress originally created to organize the anniversary events, The Post reported.
Yet that wasn't the entire story behind the celebration for America's 250th birthday and the fair, which saw low attendance, according to The New Republic. In June, Trump officials shifted roughly $90 million away from the National Park Service, drawing on entrance fees from some of the nation's most visited parks—including Yellowstone and Yosemite—to bankroll anniversary-related projects.
Private donations helped fund the fair, including corporate groups such as Boeing, Chevron, Lockheed Martin and Palantir.
Trump administration officials later said that they "needed the money to cover routine National Park Service costs incurred during the events."
But the Department of the Interior had a different explanation, claiming to The Post that it needed the funding over "heightened security needs in light of recent threats levied at the president" following the White House Correspondents' Dinner assassination attempt in April and the UFC event on the White House lawn.