The president of the United States ordered the secret development of a safe underground facility at the White House and constructed a new extension of the East Wing on prime.
It was 1941, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had been inspired to construct a bomb shelter at the White House in the aftermath of the assault on Pearl Harbor.
At the time, “no public acknowledgment was made of there being a bomb shelter under construction, only the East Wing,” according to White House Historical Association historian Bill Seale.
More than 80 years later, the East Wing is once more below development in preparation for President Donald Trump’s sprawling new ballroom, and the historic, if dated, underground services have been dismantled. And as soon as once more, there’s a lot of secrecy round plans to rebuild the bunker.
Little is publicly identified about the development going down in what was as soon as a secret submarine-like bunker, which included the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and the underground infrastructure round it. The area has been used for every little thing from watching a parody movie the Nixon administration deemed pornographic and wished killed, to planning former President Joe Biden’s clandestine journey to Ukraine. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney was evacuated to the area moments earlier than an assault on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
The area is now seemingly being reimagined and changed with new know-how to counter evolving threats, in accordance with a supply with information of the matter.
But there has been little or no acknowledgment that the project even exists.
During a current assembly of the National Capital Planning Commission the place the ballroom was mentioned, White House director of administration and administration Joshua Fisher mentioned broadly that the total ballroom project will “(enhance) mission critical functionality,” “make necessary security enhancements” and “(deliver) resilient, adaptive infrastructure aligned with future mission needs.”
Fisher was pressed on why the project broke with precedent by beginning the demolition course of with out the fee’s approval — and he indicated that the “top-secret” work going down underground was the motivation.
“There are some things regarding this project that are, frankly, of top-secret nature that we are currently working on. That does not preclude us from changing the above-grade structure, but that work needed to be considered when doing this project, which was not part of the NCPC process,” he mentioned.
The White House declined NCS’s request for remark. But in a court docket submitting final week for a case in search of to cease the East Wing development, the White House defended the course of, saying that halting the underground development would “endanger national security and therefore impair the public interest.” It mentioned the reasoning for this was described in a “classified declaration” hooked up to the case.
Here’s what we learn about what was there earlier than — and what’s going on now.
Though Roosevelt’s development was initially envisioned as a bomb shelter, underground services beneath the East Wing developed over time to serve a number of capabilities.
Those who enter by the East Wing would go down a few ranges and then stroll by a large, protected vault-style door to enter a self-contained bunker with low ceilings that included beds, shelf-stable meals, water, and different provides, plus safe communications to the exterior world, in accordance with a supply who has been inside the area and was not approved to talk on the report.
The underground area additionally included the PEOC, a centralized command and management facility for the president and his workers that was fortified to resist a potential nuclear explosion or different main assault.
The PEOC works in tandem with the Situation Room, mentioned Jonathan Wackrow, a former US Secret Service agent and NCS contributor.
“The Situation Room is a much more focused watch center that will feed information over to the PEOC, but because it is a complex that’s in the West Wing, it is secure to a point, but it’s not a hardened facility,” he mentioned.
“The PEOC is used during emergencies. It’s not something that everybody goes to,” he added. “The Situation Room is used almost by the whole of government, 24 hours-a day.”
The PEOC has been depicted on the silver display with various levels of accuracy — most just lately in the 2025 thriller “A House of Dynamite,” together with 2013’s “Olympus Has Fallen,” which depicted a terror assault on the White House.
The “tomb-like” area was visited by Roosevelt solely as soon as, in accordance with Seale, the historian. In subsequent years, “an inspection of the bomb shelter became a first-day custom for all incoming presidents who followed, until the last twenty years, when the relevance of the shelter was lessened,” he wrote in 2011.
A second supply accustomed to the area granted anonymity to talk freely described the underground advanced as “a very complicated submarine that was built in the 1940s — a self-contained unit, [with] separate power backups, separate water backups, separate air filtration.”
“But all the infrastructure is 1940s infrastructure,” they added.
The advanced additionally had a safe evacuation route, in accordance with the first supply, by which the president might be faraway from White House grounds to a different location.
Demolition on the East Wing began in October, and the excavators that dismantled the East Colonnade and workplace area traditionally occupied by first women took the dated underground facility together with it.
“With a high degree of confidence, I would say that all of the subterranean structures,” together with the PEOC, heating and air utilities, and underground services for the White House Military Office and US Secret Service Uniformed Division, “all of that seems to be gone,” the second supply mentioned.
For anybody involved about presidential safety in the absence of the bunker, that supply mentioned there are many redundancies to maintain the president secure in the occasion of an emergency.
While it’s unlikely that plans will emerge in public anytime quickly, details may include time: The PEOC performed a important position on September 11, 2001, and choose photographs from inside the middle that day have been launched through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015.
Trump has instructed the US navy is “very much involved” in the ballroom development, and it’s seemingly that the project is being executed by some mixture of navy officers; Secret Service; the Executive Office of the President; contractor Clark Construction, which has important experience in extremely safe facility development; and Shalom Baranes Architects, the group main the ballroom development, which additionally led the project to rebuild and fortify the Pentagon after the 9/11 assault.
Wackrow, now a danger administration government, predicted that no matter replaces the underground area will be capable to anticipate and reply to rising threats, together with kinetic threats like a nuclear explosion or aircraft crash; chemical or organic devices; or electromagnetic pulses, amongst different potential considerations, and achieve this with out telegraphing details to potential adversaries.
“You have to think about a facility that can be built in secret, highly classified, that can sustain the current and future state threat environment,” he mentioned.
What might be nearly unimaginable: studying how a lot this facet of development prices. Trump has provided an ever-growing price ticket on the ballroom facet of the project, which began at $200 million and is now as much as $400 million, however that doesn’t account for what is going to occur underground. Trump has made clear that the ballroom might be paid for by non-public donors, however any subterranean safety infrastructure will in the end be paid for by American taxpayers.
“If you think about trying to mitigate the threats today and the threats for tomorrow, you’re really talking about emerging technologies, emerging infrastructure — stuff that may not be commercially available. We’re never going to get the line of sight on how much that costs,” Wackrow mentioned.