When the president of the United States decides to demolish the East Wing of the White House to construct a ballroom, all that stucco and molding and wood has to go somewhere. So I tried to find it.
I’d heard that the dirt from the East Wing demolition was being deposited three miles away, on a tree-lined island next to the Jefferson Memorial called East Potomac Park. So yesterday I drove around until I saw trucks and men in construction gear. They were congregating at an entrance to the public East Potomac Golf Links, where rounds of golf carried on as usual, except every few minutes, dump trucks entered the green.
The trucks would cut across the course to a cordoned-off site in the middle, where the grass had been torn away and replaced with piles of dirt. It did not look like much, but several employees at the site confirmed: This was not just any dirt. This was White House dirt. The precursor to the East Wing was constructed during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration in 1902 and updated during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the ’40s. Maybe this was not just White House dirt but Roosevelt-era dirt. I gazed upon the golfers going about their games. Do they know, I wondered, that they are in the presence of such particularly American soil?
I asked one employee what the plan was for all this dirt. “Oh, they’re gonna turn it into another hole,” he said. Other reporters have heard the same. But when I asked a different employee about it, he demurred; his boss drove by and said, “No comment” before my colleague Grace Buono had even asked him a question. Donald Trump has reportedly been considering rebranding East Potomac Golf Links as the Washington National Golf Course and giving it a makeover. He even mocked up a new golden logo for it that’s nearly identical to those of the courses he owns. I suppose the East Wing demolition is an excellent source of soil. (The White House did not respond to my request for comment. It told CBS News that wood and plants from the site could end up being recycled for garden nurseries.)
To test if this really was a White House operation, Grace and I followed one of the trucks out of the golf course, past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, to a path that normally leads to the White House but was blockaded. Suspicious! The guard let in the truck but not Grace and me, even though we tried to look important. So we went inside the nearby Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, which has a second-story window that looked out over the barricades. We enjoyed the center’s exhibit on the “American Dream Experience,” which includes tape of a vintage Oprah Winfrey interview, while we watched four dump trucks stand in a line on Pennsylvania Avenue, presumably getting ready to haul some more debris from the demolished East Wing.
So far, though, we’d only seen dirt. The East Wing had housed the Office of the First Lady. It had a movie theater. It had an emergency bunker. The president might have been able to knock down part of one of the most cherished buildings in the United States in a matter of days, but he couldn’t make its remnants poof into nothing. There had to be some concrete, some wood, some rebar, somewhere. I wanted to find the debris.
Generally, what happens to the White House’s trash is secret—at least as of 2018, which was apparently the last time the federal government released any information on where Oval Office garbage goes. The General Services Administration, which oversees the White House’s day-to-day operations, said back then that it does take out trash and recycling, but it did not reveal which company provides the service or where the refuse goes. But the interest in the East Wing demolition had been acute enough that a local-news outlet had identified one of the East Wing dump sites—an industrial park in Hyattsville, Maryland. We headed there.
This particular road in Hyattsville is the place to go if you need your car repaired or your roof redone. We stopped in at a roofing-supply company next to the dump site, where the man behind the counter simply said it was very sad that this part of the White House had been demolished. He asked that, if we found any debris, we bring him back a piece of rebar.
We had walked about 30 yards into the dump—mostly mounds of dirt and gravel—when a man in an American-flag T-shirt emerged from the guard house and asked why we were there. I guess two 20-something women in office wear stood out at a hard-hat-only industrial-waste site. When we told him, he said the site definitely was not housing White House debris. Not at all! Everyone else we tried to talk with at the site—a guy in a utility vehicle, two guys unloading the back of a pickup, two driving away—either ignored us or said they’d been told not to speak to the press.
We did not find rebar for the man at the roofing-supply company. We checked at another nearby dump, which someone at a neighboring business told us might be the sort of place that would receive White House debris, but we found nothing there, either. Somewhere in the greater D.C. area, the remains of the East Wing are being processed. However much the White House, sometimes called the People’s House, means to Americans, it can still be crumbled into rubble and trucked away. At least the East Potomac Golf Links might get a new hole, which presumably anyone will be able to use, for $42 plus the cart rental.
Additional reporting by Grace Buono.
