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President Trump makes no secret of his displeasure over the cost of renovating the Federal Reserve headquarters — around $2.5 billion, or even higher by the president’s accounting.
But getting the White House to discuss another of Washington’s expensive renovation projects, the cost of refurbishing a “free” Air Force One from Qatar, is quite another matter.
In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)
In testimony before Congress in June, Troy E. Meink, the Air Force secretary, said that he thought the cost of the Air Force One renovations would be manageable. “I think there has been a number thrown around on the order of $1 billion,” he said. “But a lot of those costs associated with that are costs that we’d have experienced anyway, we will just experience them early,” before Boeing delivers its two Air Force Ones. “So it wouldn’t be anywhere near that.”
“We believe the actual retrofit of that aircraft is probably less than $400 million,” he said.
