The White House is distributing tickets for President Donald Trump’s July Fourth speech on the Mall to Republican donors and political appointees, prompting Democratic lawmakers to question whether the administration’s planned celebration violates federal ethics rules.
The Republican National Committee confirmed on Tuesday that it had received some passes to Trump’s address at the Lincoln Memorial, which it described as standard for presidential events. The speech Thursday will kick off the “Salute to America,” a revamped Independence Day observance designed by the president that will also include a military flyover and an extended fireworks display.
The awarding of tickets to GOP supporters, which was first reported Monday by HuffPost, has exacerbated tensions between the Trump administration and lawmakers who have been pressing for a full accounting from federal agencies. The White House has also provided a select number of tickets to top staffers at federal agencies, who are free to distribute them as they would like.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, in a phone interview. “No ticketed political event should be paid for with taxpayer dollars.”
Udall noted that Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had yet to respond to a request he and two other Senate Democrats made two weeks ago for a full accounting of how the event would be conducted and what it would cost.
“This is the typical stonewall of the Trump administration. But there will be hearings, and we will have an opportunity to grill the Trump administration on how much money was spent and where the money was taken from,” he said, adding that agencies cannot just divert money unilaterally. “The Congress tells the executive branch how to spend money.”
Amanda Yanchury, a spokeswoman for Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said in an email that McCollum “takes her oversight responsibilities seriously and will exercise her role as chair to get a full accounting of the taxpayer costs incurred by this event.”
The Interior Department declined to comment Tuesday.
An official from the RNC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s workings, said in an email that the Democratic National Committee had also received passes to White House events when a Democrat was in the Oval Office.
“It’s standard practice for the RNC to receive a small number of tickets to events just as the DNC did under Democrat Presidents,” the official said.
