The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to build a 33,000-square-foot underground security screening center beneath Sherman Park, just south of the Treasury building, to process visitors heading to the White House.
Renderings of the facility surfaced Friday in a preliminary agenda for the National Capital Planning Commission's April 2 meeting, revealing a project that would replace the patchwork of temporary trailers and tents the Secret Service has relied on since 2005.
That's more than two decades of "temporary" infrastructure handling security for the most important building in America. The upgrade is long overdue.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the planned center would sit entirely underground, accessed via a 5,000-square-foot recessed entry plaza with ramp access at the intersection of 15th Street and E Street. Inside, seven processing lanes would screen visitors before they reach the White House grounds. A second structure of approximately 4,000 square feet is also planned along East Executive Avenue.
Ground could break as soon as August, with the White House targeting a July 2028 opening, roughly six months before Trump leaves office. The timeline is aggressive, but the project addresses a security gap that previous administrations were content to paper over with tents.
There is something revealing about the fact that for over twenty years, the Secret Service screened visitors to the White House using temporary structures. The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting across four presidential administrations. Every year that those trailers stayed in place was another year that Washington's permanent bureaucracy decided the status quo was good enough.
Building a purpose-designed, permanent underground facility is the kind of infrastructure investment that should be uncontroversial. The White House receives thousands of visitors. The Secret Service deserves real tools, not improvised ones. A modern screening center with dedicated processing lanes is a basic operational upgrade that treats security like the serious matter it is.
The NCPC's April 2 session will be a busy one. The commission is also set to debate and cast a final vote on the administration's proposed 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the project tied to President Trump's order last fall to demolish the East Wing to clear space for the new structure.
The ballroom proposal has drawn its share of attention, but linking it to the screening center review means both projects will face the commission simultaneously. The administration is clearly pushing to lock in approvals and get construction moving while it has the political window to do so.
The July 2028 target date matters. It falls six months before the end of Trump's term, which means the administration is working backward from a hard deadline. Projects like these have a way of stalling in Washington, caught between review boards, environmental studies, and the general inertia that keeps the federal government running on duct tape and good intentions. Setting an ambitious timeline forces momentum.
Critics will inevitably frame any construction near the White House as vanity. That argument collapses when you look at what currently exists: tents. The Secret Service has been operating out of structures that wouldn't pass muster at a county fair, and nobody in Washington thought that was worth fixing until now.
The broader pattern here is worth noting. Washington is a city that spends freely on almost everything except the things that obviously need doing. Billions flow to agencies with overlapping mandates and questionable outcomes, but the physical security infrastructure protecting the President of the United States gets the temporary-trailer treatment for two decades.
It took an administration willing to actually build things to put a permanent solution on the table. The NCPC will weigh in on April 2. The renderings are public. The timeline is set.
Twenty-one years of tents is not a security plan. It's an embarrassment someone finally decided to fix.