Congressional Oversight Testimony: Shady Schemes Fund Trump Pet Projects
Testimony of Public Citizen Democracy Advocate Jon Golinger before Members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on “Monumental Waste: How Donald Trump Is Spending Millions Destroying American Landmarks” - July 21, 2026
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The following testimony was delivered at a Congressional Oversight Spotlight Hearing held on July 21, 2026. The full video of the hearing can be viewed here.
July 21, 2026
Ranking Member Garcia, Ranking Member Blumenthal and Members,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Jon Golinger. I work for Public Citizen as the Democracy Advocate where I investigate corporate influence on elections and government, push to strengthen political and lobbying disclosure, and advocate for policies around money and politics.
Public Citizen is a national public interest organization with more than 1 million members and supporters. For more than 50 years, Public Citizen has advocated for stronger consumer protection and to fight fraud; for corporate and government accountability; and for ethics and honest government measures to combat graft and corruption.
Corruption Costs Us All
Corruption is not a victimless crime – corruption costs us all.
When corruption is directed at the government, taxpayers are ripped off, legitimate and necessary government work may go unperformed and public services may not be effectively rendered, program integrity is compromised, and people’s faith in government to fairly steward their tax dollars is destroyed. In the awarding of government contracts to businesses to provide goods and services, corruption of the contract process strikes a dagger into the heart of a free and fair marketplace. It punishes honest American businesses for playing by the rules while financially rewarding bad actors for breaking them. Corruption in government contracting is anti-competitive, costly, and corrosive and the American people pay the price.
Meredith O’Rourke: Trump’s Fundraiser-In-Chief
The week before a wrecking ball smashed into the East Wing, a room of around 100 people came to the White House for a candlelight dinner. They were there so that President Trump could thank them for donating millions of dollars to fund his favorite pet-project, the White House Golden Ballroom, and to hear about another of his pet-projects, a 250 foot monumental arch honoring himself. These ballroom dinner donors were prominent lobbyists, big-wig corporate executives, current and wanna-be billionaires, and all kinds of government influence peddlers and favor-seekers.
And at the center of it all, sitting at the head table, closest to the president’s golden podium, was the person responsible for raising all the money from all these people, sitting at the center of the secretive fundraising machine a federal judge has called a “Rube Goldberg Contraption”: Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s fundraiser-in-chief.
A profile of Ms. O’Rourke last fall in a Florida publication called “Influence Magazine” reported that O’Rourke doesn’t like the spotlight shined on herself and her work. I think that’s the case for good reason. Doing so exposes the secretive and shady schemes that O’Rourke has employed to raise money for a suite of Trump’s vanity pet projects: the White House Ballroom Project, Freedom 250, the National Garden of American Heroes, the trashing of the Kennedy Center, probably the Arch and others.
Cloaking Corruption Behind Tax-Exempt Charities
Central to these schemes has been cloaking O’Rourke’s fundraising for Trump’s pet projects with the veneer of legitimacy – and secrecy – by funneling the money through tax-exempt, charitable organizations – some of them long-standing and previously reputable charities like the Trust for the National Mall, which has served as the money funnel for $400 million raised by Ms. O’Rourke into the White House Ballroom debacle, and the National Park Foundation, which has been used to funnel millions raised by Ms. O’Rourke into Trump’s Freedom 250 fiasco. The template for funding both of these Trump projects was the same: hijack a legitimate charity, funnel money from donors who want or have gotten something from the Trump Administration through them so they can be both tax-exempt and done in secret, steer the money into a fund Trump controls so he can dole out contracts to allies and spend wild sums on wasteful projects.
White House Ballroom Project
Attached to my testimony is the secret document Public Citizen obtained through a FOIA lawsuit that lays out the Ballroom Project funding scheme in black and white, including provisions requiring donors who wish to remain anonymous to be secret. A Public Citizen report found that corporate ballroom donors have received new or increased government contracts totaling $50 billion since they pledged or donated. And most of the known corporate ballroom donors – 16 out of 27 – are facing federal enforcement actions or have had them suspended by the Trump Administration. We have no idea – yet – what the anonymous Ballroom Project donors wanted or got.
Freedom 250
Last month, Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project analyzed the federal contracts and corporate sponsorship deals related to Freedom 250 – a Trump-aligned limited liability company created last October and housed inside the National Park Foundation, where Ms. O’Rourke was installed this past March as a Board Member in March. – and found that 20 corporate sponsors funded Freedom 250, including ExxonMobil, Oracle, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and United Airlines contributing undisclosed sums with no oversight, even as they face major federal regulatory issues. The fundraising for Freedom 250 has been done through Ms. O’Rourke and her firm, which circulated bespoke donor sponsorship packages beginning at $500,000 and climbing above $10 million, with donors getting private access to the president. The donations to Freedom 250, since they flow through the tax-exempt National Park Foundation before going to the secretive shell company, are subsidized by taxpayers.
National Garden of American Heroes
In another case, Ms. O’Rourke and her associates have simply invented a tax-exempt charity of their own out of thin air to funnel shady and anonymous money in secrecy. According to the pledge agreement prepared for prospective donors, the National Garden of American Heroes Foundation was established in 2026 to fund two Trump projects: the development of Garden of Heroes at West Potomac Park and the redevelopment and dramatic expansion of the East Potomac Park Golf Course. The pledge agreement lists Ms. O’Rourke and her associate as the contacts for donors and states that the entity “will seek to retain the anonymity of anonymous contributors.”
The American People Pay The Price
What all of these sketchy schemes have in common is this: corporate and billionaire donors who want something from government benefit, Meredith O’Rourke and her lobbyist friends benefit, the charities funneling the shady money benefit, and Donald Trump benefits. But through wasteful and bloated government contracts, taxpayer subsidies and tax-breaks, and the demolition and damage to American landmarks that will have to be repaired, the American people are and will continue to pay the price.
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