Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior Appropriations Committee Republican, questioned whether federal funds should be spent on construction of President Donald Trump’s triumphal arch, which the president claimed over the weekend could be used for military purposes.
“There’s a lot of things that we need the military funding for — in fact, we’re short on military funding right now,” Simpson told reporters at the Capitol on Monday.
“If it was my choice, I wouldn’t put any of that money into the arch,” Simpson added, when pressed on whether Pentagon funding should be used at all.
Simpson spoke a day after Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that the arch — which he wants to build less than a mile from the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial — would be used to store and deploy drones and snipers.
Given that rationale, Simpson said the arch is “something that needs to be debated” and that other Defense Department needs should take priority.
“I hope if they decide to do it, that they would come to Congress and ask for an appropriation for it if they’re going to use appropriated dollars to do it,” Simpson said.
Simpson also questioned Trump’s ban of three news outlets over the weekend, including POLITICO, as well a recent comments from House Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) suggesting members of the media should be barred from the the Speaker’s Lobby, a space just off the House floor. He called any such media ban “wrong.”
“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting — or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that — that’s not the reason to ban the press,” he said. “You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest. So I don’t like what they’re doing.”
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