Hundreds Lambast Trump’s $7.5M Plan to Whitewash Eisenhower Building
"Don't even think about it," wrote one of over 2,000 concerned citizens, architects, and preservationists who warned of permanent damage to the structure.
“Are you out of your minds?” wrote Jessica Douglas in an email to the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) ahead of a meeting about the Trump administration's plan to whitewash the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's granite exterior.
According to over 2,000 public responses submitted to the NCPC, hundreds of concerned citizens like Douglas have voiced their disapproval of the Eisenhower Executive Office Beautification Project before the commission reviewed the proposal on May 7, emphasizing that paint and granite are about as compatible as oil and water.
Trump posited the idea of painting over the federal office in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham last November, when he showed off renderings of the all-white update during a White House tour following the hasty demolition of the East Wing. “It was always considered an ugly building,” Trump said of the National Historic Landmark, which was constructed between 1871 and 1888 from purplish-gray Virginia granite in the French Second Empire style, adding that “grey is for funerals.”
Considering the speed at which Trump took a wrecking ball to the White House itself, the DC Preservation League nonprofit and Cultural Heritage Partners law firm wasted no time in filing a complaint with the District Court in Washington, DC, almost immediately after the Fox interview. Together, they sought an emergency injunction to prevent any alterations to the building until the administration “complies with the procedural requirements of federal preservation and environmental law.”
The complaint also underscored that painting over granite would trap in moisture and accelerate the material degradation of the entire structure — a concern widely echoed in recent public responses from architects, preservationists, and individuals worried about permanent damage to the landmark. (Cultural Heritage Partners ultimately withdrew the complaint a month later, after the General Services Administration assured the law firm that it was not issuing any contracted work for the building's renovation until March 2026.)
Between the proposal's options of painting the building in its entirety versus leaving the granite façade of the exposed basement, the US Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were appointed by the president, endorsed the former on April 16. However, the agency stipulated that additional technical testing must ensure that the selected paint wouldn't cause any permanent damage.
Before NCPC's May 7 review of the project, Seattle-based architect Amy Barnett cited the moisture infiltration phenomenon associated with the aesthetic trend of sandblasting brick walls during the 1970 and ’80s, which ended up removing their water-resistant surfaces, in her emailed plea for the commission to reject the proposal.
“Instead of coating the building with white paint, please explore cleaning and restoring the exterior in a manner that lets the natural granite be preserved for future generations,” Barnett wrote.
During the review session, Ryan Erb, the construction operations project manager for the White House Office of Administration, who is steering the project, mentioned that the estimated cost of painting the building was at least $7.5 million, without factoring in the cleaning, resurfacing, and repointing of the granite required beforehand, nor the necessary renovations to the cast-iron gates.
Erb also said that exterior paints are being tested on granite samples to evaluate for surface damage upon removal, as well as the potential for waterproofing and weatherizing for up to 25 years. However, hundreds of respondents like Barnett repeatedly stressed to the NCPC that this was simply impossible.
“In environments with high relative humidity such as the District of Columbia, paint coatings will prevent the water vapor from escaping the building interior, thus saturating exterior masonry wall assemblies and causing significant damage to interior and exterior materials,” warned James J. Malanaphy III, another architect and historian, who also underscored the future costs of maintenance and repair.
Emily O'Mahony, the former president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and Russ Carnahan, president of the nonprofit organization Preservation Action, reiterated that the use of granite was a “deliberate and celebrated design choice that has defined this part of the capital for more than 135 years.”
Hundreds of non-experts also chimed in emphatically against the plan, including general taxpayers who saw the project as an exorbitant money sink and an unnecessary affront to the building's aesthetic importance.
The NCPC unanimously decided that the administration had to provide more information about the paint's capacity to cause permanent damage before the proposal could move any further, despite industry experts' urgent calls for its rejection.
Dialogue about the Eisenhower Building's potential whitewash, and its estimated cost, unfolds as the Lincoln Memorial Reflective Pool is currently being painted “American Flag Blue,” running up $13.1 million in expenses so far — over seven times the initial $1.8 million price tag Trump announced ahead of the job.
