Trump’s Ballroom: The Capstone and the Buried Chambers of the Deep Digital State

Donald Trump promised to put America First. Yet right now, beneath the East Wing of the White House, something very different is taking shape. Trump himself described it plainly.

By Global Affairs

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Donald Trump promised to put America First. Yet right now, beneath the East Wing of the White House, something very different is taking shape. Trump himself described it plainly. A six-level underground complex with a military hospital, research facilities, bomb shelters, and hardened command installations. Two floors were already being dug by May. The glittering new ballroom above ground is little more than a capstone. A polished lid sitting over a much darker project.

The people funding that visible monument are the usual players in federal contracting. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Booz Allen Hamilton all appear on the donor list. These are not random patriots writing checks for pretty architecture. These are the same companies already positioned to dominate federal cloud contracts, AI systems, surveillance tools, and data consolidation. To put it bluntly, they pay for the spectacle while wiring the machine running underneath it.

That same corporate world has now moved straight into the White House advisory structure. In March 2026, Trump named the first members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Starting with Oracle’s Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, followed by Dell’s Michael Dell. Other tech barons whose companies control the cloud, the chips, the data, and the platforms. In late May, he added a safe pair of hands in former Attorney General Pam Bondi. David Sacks welcomed her specifically because she knows how to clear legal and regulatory barriers for the AI agenda. Builders, funders, and enforcers, all sitting in the same room.

Oracle’s Dual Track

No company sits more completely at the center of this emerging system than Oracle.

Through Catz and Ellison, Oracle holds formal seats on PCAST. Through the Genesis Mission, it partners directly with the White House national AI platform. Through the GSA OneGov agreement, it gets steep government-wide discounts on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The Oracle Health platform, formerly Cerner, already runs MHS GENESIS, the Pentagon’s central electronic health record system serving over 9.5 million beneficiaries, now moving deeper into the cloud. Back in 2015, Oracle even brought former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta onto its board.

Yet at the same time, Oracle has built a hardened parallel infrastructure for another sovereign power.

Safra Catz, born in Israel, has been brutally direct. She has repeatedly said that for Oracle, it is the U.S., Israel, and then the rest of the world. “We don’t hide it“. During the Gaza war, she visited Israel multiple times, met with Netanyahu and defense officials, and declared that Oracle was there to help the government, the military, and the Israeli economy. The company built and expanded underground cloud facilities in Jerusalem, one fifty meters deep, another planned nine floors underground, engineered to keep Israeli government and military clients running even under direct rocket and missile fire. Catz made it clear that employees who do not support this mission might not belong at Oracle. In response to inquiries regarding the protests against Israel that were organized by staff at Google and Apple, Catz remarked “when you connect with Oracle, you understand that we are committed to the U.S. and Israel. We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none.”

Larry Ellison’s relationship with Netanyahu runs even deeper. He hosted the Israeli leader and his family on his private Hawaiian island, Lanai. He reportedly offered Netanyahu a high-paying seat on Oracle’s board while serving as a witness in one of Netanyahu’s corruption trials. Ellison has also poured millions into Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Underground in Jerusalem and underground in Washington, the parallel is almost impossible to ignore. While Oracle digs deep fortified cloud facilities in Israel to protect that country’s military and government under fire, the Trump administration is digging a six-level fortified complex beneath the White House. One set of underground infrastructure serves Israeli defense priorities. The other expands American executive power with limited public scrutiny. Both are hardened. Both are built for continuity in crisis, and both are advancing with powerful backing from the same overlapping network.

The Pattern Repeats Across the Board

Michael Dell, the CEO of DELL, is another PCAST member who has, over the years, supplied the Israeli Ministry of Defense with major contracts, including a 150 million dollar-plus server deal in 2023. Palantir, Oracle’s close partner in the Genesis Mission and a ballroom donor, signed a strategic wartime agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense for war-related missions.

IMAGE: President Trump holds a rendering of the new White House ballroom to be built, October 22. (Source: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

The donor list coordinated by the Trust for the National Mall, which manages private donations for the project, makes the direction unmistakable. The Adelson Family Foundation, one of the largest and most aggressive pro-Israel funders in America, whose stated mission is to strengthen the State of Israel and the Jewish people, helped bankroll the White House ballroom and its underground complex. Howard Lutnick & Family and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the Blackstone Group, both with long records of substantial pro-Israel philanthropy, are also major contributors. These are not casual donors. They are core players in a network that consistently puts Israel first.

The Wiring

While the physical buildout advanced above and below ground, Audrey Henson’s Drey Dossier’s investigation caught the digital layer in mid-construction. Not in press releases or polished White House branding, but in the debris every fast-moving system leaves behind when it is being assembled live.

VIDEO: Investigation – I found a second vote.gov, and it’s registered to the White House (Source: The Drey Dossier)

Henson traced certificate transparency logs showing roughly forty additional subdomains tied to the National Design Studio, many of them sitting behind the same private Cloudflare wall and pointing toward functions spread across the State Department, NASA, Homeland Security, and a working preview of vote.gov. Passport-related domains started generating certificates in early May, with photo.passports.gov producing nine in roughly an hour. Months after the Charlie Kirk episode had already faded from view, an obscure FBI Kirk tip-line domain surfaced as well.

The pattern was not only in the domain names. Programs were sending data to PostHog analytics without stripping IP addresses. Nd studio.gov carried a 539-line custom script called AutoMonitor that appeared designed to intercept browser traffic and mirror it to a private backend. Passports.gov resolved to a bare sign-in page without agency branding or a privacy notice, while the usual privacy impact assessments and Federal Register notices were hard to find or missing altogether.

Personnel movements reveal the real continuity. Multiple key Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operatives flowed straight into the National Design Studio. Greg Hogan moved from chief information officer at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where he kept access to sensitive workforce records even during a court injunction, through the National Design Studio (NDS) and straight into the leadership of Login.gov.

Akash Bobba, another DOGE engineer, presented a federal voter registration system to state election officials and admitted he did not know what data the federal government would retain. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the most visible early DOGE operatives, moved into the studio as Head of Engineering. Kaitlyn Koller, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide who served as a Senior Advisor at DOGE, joined as Director of Operations. This was not a clean handoff. It was a deliberate pipeline. Musk’s efficiency team quietly embedded itself inside the White House design and identity apparatus.

The DOGE migration represents the visible skin of a parallel system being built with thin oversight and domains routing back toward White House infrastructure. Greg Barbaccia, the federal chief information officer, said the goal was to make users feel they were interacting with “the same government.” The old seams between agencies are being deliberately erased. In February 2026, Barbcaccia was appointed as Acting Director for Technology Transformation Services (TTS) for the General Services Administration (GSA). His move into acting leadership of GSA’s TTS put him directly over the machinery that governs Login.gov, FedRAMP, and federal digital delivery, turning the White House’s cosmetic project into a structural one.

The Real Architecture

The ballroom is only the “capstone”. Beneath it sits a fortified six-level complex built for endurance and command. Around it operates a tight network of donors, advisors, and contractors whose commitments to Israel are open, aggressive, and deeply operational. Oracle builds wartime cloud fortresses for the Israeli military while helping shape America’s national AI and data systems. Major donors who prioritize Israel help pay for the President’s new security infrastructure. Executives with direct Israeli ties sit inside the White House advisory structure directing technology policy. The Drey Dossier simply caught the digital layer while it was still under construction.

IMAGE: President Donald Trump posted new renderings of the ballroom that is currently under construction, Feb. 10, 2026.
(Source: The White House)

While some may see this as a neutral modernisation, others like ourselves see this as a parallel architecture of power, built with limited oversight, thin accountability, and a clear, recurring tilt toward interests that go well beyond strict America First priorities. Let’s imagine for one second that the same pipeline of personnel, cloud authority, and identity control was linked to China instead of Israel. No serious security establishment would call that harmless modernization. That is the scale of the exposure here, with a deep, centralized digital layer being handed over to actors whose own commitments are openly non-neutral. The same people and companies pushing unified American data systems, centralized identity platforms, and massive AI infrastructure are the ones with the deepest, most open commitments to Israel.

The receipts are no longer hidden in the donor lists or the advisory boards. They are now entering the statute books. Section 224 of the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act, titled the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, would formalize deeper cooperation across AI, cyber, data fusion, and network systems. What was hidden in plain sight is now being written into law.

Americans who voted to end forever wars, foreign entanglements, and unaccountable bureaucracy have every right to look at this and demand answers. The ballroom was the distraction. Beneath it, power is being concentrated into a system built to govern without oversight.

---

The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.