Former President Joe Biden has picked Delaware as the site of his presidential library, but just how much money private donors are willing to fork over for the project remains in question.
The former Delaware senator turned vice president turned one-term president has put together a group of “former aides, friends, and political allies” to begin the extensive fundraising effort and locate a specific location, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
However, as the wire service pointed out, “Biden’s library team has the daunting task of raising money for the 46th president’s legacy project at a moment when his party has become fragmented about the way ahead and many big Democratic donors have stopped writing checks.”
President Donald Trump’s persistent reminders about the failures of the Biden administration also exacerbate the challenge.
According to AP:
It also remains to be seen whether corporations and institutional donors that have historically donated to presidential library projects — regardless of the party of the former president — will be more hesitant to contribute, with President Donald Trump maligning Biden on a daily basis and savaging groups he deems left-leaning.
Exactly where in Delaware the library would be located has not been announced, though in March, Wilmington officials pitched four locations in his home city as potential sites.
The Joe and Jill Biden Foundation this week approved a 13-member board to supervise the project. It includes former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, adviser Steve Ricchetti, and Democrat fundraiser Rufus Gifford who was named chairman of the board.
“There’s certainly folks — folks who may have been not thinking about those kinds of issues who are starting to think about them,” Gifford told AP. “That being said… we’re not going to create a budget, we’re not going to set a goal for ourselves that we don’t believe we can hit.”
The cost of presidential libraries has skyrocketed in the modern era. Starting with George H.W. Busch’s construction cost at $43 million in 1997, it rose to Bill Clinton’s $165 million project, George W. Bush’s $500 million budget, and a whopping $1.6 billion goal by the Obama Foundation for construction and an endowment.
Gifford told AP that Biden’s library cost would likely end up “somewhere in the middle” of Obama and Bush’s costs, which still would put it near the billion-dollar mark.
President Trump, meanwhile, has a head start on any library effort well before his second term ends.
The president has accumulated millions of dollars from lawsuits against X, ABC News, Meta, and Paramount Global — in a $16 million settlement for the CBS 60 Minutes election interference case — and designated portions of that money to his future library, according to AP.
Trump has also accepted a free jumbo jet from the Qatar government which is currently being retrofitted as the new Air Force One while Boeing builds a plane to fill a pending order.
White House officials have said the $400 million Qatari 747-8 would then be donated to his library. It would apparently be displayed like the 707 in the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California, where museum goers can board and tour the jet.
While past presidents have buildings that house their libraries, they are overseen by the Office of Presidential Libraries at the National Archives and Records Administration.
As of now, the Biden library exists only as a web page in the National Archives system. Its home page features a grinning photo of the former president in the Oval Office with a quote he often used in appearances:
We are the United States of America. There is not a single thing — nothing — nothing beyond our capacity. We can do whatever we set our mind to if we do it together.
His supporters are hoping the 82-year-old former president’s words hold true for the mammoth fundraising needed make his Delaware library a reality.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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