Why is the White House bringing dirt to a golf course? It’s a DC mystery

Visitors to East Potomac Park in Washington DC may have noticed a new landform emerging in recent days: a huge mound of dirt abutting one of the three municipal golf courses on the property.

But not alone each filthy.

The debris comes from the White House, where an East Wing renovation project ordered by President Trump is underway, reportedly at a cost of $300 million. Since the middle of last week, truckloads of dirt have been arriving at the federally owned park, which is home to two nine-hole courses and the main attraction: an 18-hole course called East Potomac Golf Links, designed by Walter Travis and dating to the 1920s.

The earth moving was first reported by the WashingtonPost and has been confirmed by GOLF.com, but exactly why the White House is transporting the debris to East Potomac’s nine-hole White course, on the north side of the property, is unclear.

The After reported that some of the discards will be used to add mounding to East Potomac Golf Links. But National Links Trust, the not-for-profit organization that operates the course and plans to develop it, has made no comment on the matter and referred all questions to the Home Office. (The Interior Ministry did not respond to multiple emails from GOLF.com.)

When the National Links Trust secured the lease for the course, plus two other DC munis, in 2020, it announced plans for a Tom Doak-led restoration of a reversible design, meaning each nine can be played in two directions. More than five years later, that work has still not started, but there is no indication that the organization’s long-term vision for the property has changed.

This story gets even more interesting because President Trump has reportedly taken a look at the golf course — or at least the sought-after real estate on which the course sits: a strip of land between the Potomac River and the Washington Channel overlooking the Washington Monument. Last month Politics reported that the president is “interested in the idea … of renovating the course” and renaming it “Washington National Golf Course.”

That change in strategy would be complicated because National Links Trust owns the lease for the track 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 plans to do with the other two munis it is charged with developing: Langston and Rock Creek. “We are very excited to take on the management of these remarkable properties,” said NLT co-founder Michael McCartin when the lease was announced, “and are confident that our plans, which will be implemented over the coming years, will materially benefit both golfers and the surrounding communities.”

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

The pile of dirt that has accumulated on the White course over the past week has been contained by fencing. Monday morning a bulldozer could be seen pushing the earth around.

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

“It’s ongoing,” the staffer said. “I’m still coming in.”