Hello and welcome to the Punch Bowl News Readback podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen, and this week I'm joined by Laura Weiss,

who's here to talk all things, Senate, reconciliation, bird bath, ballroom funding, all the above.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me to start us off. Talk to us about

the security funding request, the $1 billion, and what is for the ballroom, what's not for the

ballroom, because there's a lot of confusion here. And you're an expert on this. So talk us through

what's going on. Yeah, totally. So I think, Max, like, part of the reason there's confusion is because the bill

text comes out from Senate Republicans, and there's this pot of a billion dollars for the Secret

Service that was unexpected in this bill. And then there's this language talking about the East Wing

project, and it's for, you know, saying security for this project. It's security

money, but no one was really expecting the ballroom in there. I mean, there was some chatter,

you know, after the White House Correspondence Dinner attack, that that would be something

necessary, but I still think a lot of Republicans were not fully expecting to need to

deal with this in this reconciliation bill. And then it happened. And, you know, Republicans on Capitol

Hill in the House, in the Senate, have been asking for more detail on this money, for more

information from the Secret Service, from the Department of Homeland Security.

You've had the Secret Service Director. You've had Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen

up here on the Hill this week, trying to explain this, give context, get members into a

comfortable place, but it's a real problem for the Trump administration.

As you and Andrew wrote in AM on Friday, a lot of senators, I'm not sure a significant amount

of senators on the Republican side think that voting for any money, which could go towards

the new Ballroom Project in the East Wing, even if it does say, quote, security funding.

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