Why is the White House carting dirt to a golf course? It’s a D.C. mystery

Visitors to East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., might have noticed a new landform taking shape over the past several days: a massive pile of dirt abutting one of the three municipal golf courses on the property.    

But not just any dirt.

The rubble has been coming from the White House, where a President Trump-commissioned East Wing renovation project is underway, reportedly to the tune of $300 million. Since the middle of last week, dirt has been arriving by the truckload to the federally owned park, which is home to two nine-hole courses and the main attraction: an 18-hole layout called East Potomac Golf Links, which was designed by Walter Travis and dates to the 1920s.

The earth-moving was first reported by the Washington Post and has been confirmed by GOLF.com, but exactly why the White House is carting the debris to East Potomac’s nine-hole White course, toward the northern end of the property, is unclear.

The Post reported that some of the discard will be used to add mounding to East Potomac Golf Links. But National Links Trust, the non-profit that operates and has plans to develop the course, has not commented on the matter and is referring all inquiries to the Department of the Interior. (The Department of the Interior has not responded to multiple emails from GOLF.com.)

When the National Links Trust landed the lease to the course, plus two other D.C. munis, in 2020, it announced plans for a Tom Doak-led restoration of what is a reversible design, meaning each nine can be played in two directions. More than five years later that work still hasn’t begun, but there are no indications that the organization’s long-term vision for the property has changed.

This story gets even more interesting because President Trump reportedly has taken a taken a shine to the golf course — or at least to the desirable real estate upon which the course sits: a strip of land between the Potomac River and the Washington Channel that serves up views of the Washington Monument. Last month Politico reported that the President has “warmed to an idea … of refurbishing the course” and rebranding it “Washington National Golf Course.”

That shift in strategy would be complicated because National Links Trust owns the lease to the course until 2070 — a deal it signed during Trump’s first term — and has its own plans to restore the design to glory, as NLT also intends to do with the other two munis it has been charged with developing: Langston and Rock Creek. “We are very excited to take on the stewardship of these remarkable properties,” NLT co-founder Michael McCartin said when the lease was announced, “and are fully confident that our plans, which will be implemented over the next several years, will substantially benefit both golfers and the surrounding communities.”

East Potomac is the oldest of D.C.’s three munis and was the site, in 1923, of the second playing of the U.S. Public Links Championship. In the 1940s, it became the center of efforts to desegregate the city’s public golf courses, and to this day attracts golfers from a wide swath of backgrounds and demographics.

The dirt pile that has been accumulating over the last week by the White course is penned in by chain-link fence. On Monday morning, a bulldozer could be seen pushing the earth around.  

A visitor asked an employee about the mysterious migration of rubble from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“It’s ongoing,” the staffer said. “Still coming in.”