Mother Jones illustration; Wikimedia; Joe Milmoe/Department of the Interior; Marco Cordone/ZUMA
In April, the National Park Service placed a statue of Caesar Rodney, one of America’s Founding Fathers, in Freedom Plaza, a small park near the White House.
That installation drew notice, and criticism, because Rodney, a plantation owner from Delaware who played a key role in crafting the Declaration of Independence, enslaved people—a complication that in 2020 led to the statue being taken down from its previous perch in Wilmington.
But the administration didn’t just resurrect the statue of a slave owner and place it in a prime location in the Nation’s Capital; they spent a striking amount of money to do it. Documents obtained by Mother Jones show the National Park Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior, paid $527,226 just to build a base on which to place the sculpture, which had been sitting in storage. Contracting documents obtained by Mother Jones indicate the cost for the pedestal was nearly double the government’s original estimate.
The documents also show that the agency initially awarded the contract for refurbishing all of Freedom Plaza last December, then added the Rodney statue in January in a no-bid process. The agency modified the existing contract, conducting no competitive bidding, and agreed to the sharply higher price because—as with much of the administration’s “beautification” effort connected to the anniversary—it was in a rush.
“The work was expedited to ensure it is done before our nation’s 250th,” an Interior Department official told Mother Jones. “All of the projects throughout DC are set to be done before the Fourth, so they have to be done on a rolling basis.”
“By definition, urgency should be used when a delay would result in a serious injury to the government. It’s inconceivable to think that a statue for a holiday celebration meets that standard.”
Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said that the Trump Administration’s justification for paying a surcharge to have the job finished quickly is both atypical and unethical. “By definition, urgency should be used when a delay would result in a serious injury to the government,” Amey says. “It’s inconceivable to think that a statue for a holiday celebration meets that standard.”
Rodney is one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers, but it’s unlikely that July 4, 1776 would be America’s Independence Day without him. In June of that year, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution calling for the Second Continental Congress to make a formal declaration of independence certifying the 13 original colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent states.”
After a three-week recess, the Congress reconvened to vote on the resolution on July 1. The delegates who attended from each colony had to vote as a bloc, but Rodney was back in Delaware, sick with cancer. Meanwhile, Delaware’s other two delegates were split. Upon hearing of the stalemate between his colleagues, Rodney rode the 80 miles to Philadelphia overnight in a thunderstorm to support the resolution.
Though the statue depicts Rodney riding to Philadelphia on horseback, University of Delaware history professor Jonathan Russ says Rodney most likely rode in a carriage for part of the trip. “It has probably become romanticized that he rode the entire journey on horseback,” Russ says.
But mounted or not, Rodney’s ride meant that Delaware would be able to join 11 other colonies in supporting the resolution—New York had initially abstained from the vote. The delegates then adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4. As with all the delegates who supported the secession, Rodney would have likely been found guilty of treason by Great Britain if the United States didn’t win the Revolutionary War.
“Whatever punishment [Britain] would have meted out to the [Revolutionary] leaders—be that prison time or ultimately being condemned to death—Rodney would have been on their list,” Russ says.
The monument commemorating Rodney’s famous midnight ride was unveiled in downtown Wilmington’s Rodney Square on July 4, 1923. But in the summer of 2020, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd, when statues of Confederate leaders were taken down all over the country, this statue was also removed and placed in a private storage facility.
As with many historical figures, Rodney’s record on human rights is complicated. In 1776, for example, Rodney introduced a bill in the Delaware assembly to prohibit the importation of slaves into the state. But he also enslaved up to 200 people, according to some historical accounts. That’s why Wilmington’s mayor unilaterally called for the statue’s removal in June 2020.
A few months later, Trump described the movement as the “result of an extreme anti-American historical revisionism propagated by organizations like the New York Times and its 1619 Project, critical race theorists on college campuses, cancel culture adherents in corporate boardrooms, and flag-burning mobs on city streets who seek to reframe our Nation’s history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”
This anti-woke zealotry has continued in the years since, now animating Trump’s second term—particularly, his efforts to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.
“The Trump administration has been committed to celebrating and acknowledging the full breadth of our nation’s history, including the story of Caesar Rodney and his pivotal ride in July 1776.”
In addition to the Rodney installation, Trump’s current fixation with statues includes one of Christopher Columbus, which was placed on White House grounds in the Spring. It’s a replica of the one that had originally been in Baltimore before it was knocked down and thrown into the city’s inner harbor by protesters in 2020.
In May, Trump also announced plans to build a “Garden of American Heroes” featuring statues of 250 “AMERICAN HEROES” in West Potomac Park, near the Washington Monument. According to Trump, the garden will feature “Founding Fathers, Military Warriors, Religious Leaders, Civil Rights Champions, World Class Athletes, Artists, Entertainers, and MORE.”
The White House has cited the 250th anniversary as a reason for the increased costs associated with short timelines. The White House in April asked Congress for $10 billion for a general fund the administration says will pay for beautification of the National Park Service (NPS) land around Washington. Meanwhile, the Department requested just $3 billion for repair and maintenance needs in National Parks across the rest of the country in 2027, and the department lost more than 2,000 employees to buyouts, forced retirements, and other reductions in staffing over the last year.
Trump has touted his efforts to restore fountains throughout Washington, DC, ahead of July 4. Those efforts include repairing long-broken fountains in Lafayette Square, near the White House, and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, on the National Mall. But as the New York Times has reported, the administration has awarded contracts for that work to handpicked vendors, sidestepping a competitive bidding process by invoking an exemption, which notes that this process can be avoided if urgency is required to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government.” For the administration, the July 4 deadline for completing the work was sufficiently urgent to bypass competitive bidding.
The installation of the Rodney statue followed a similar pattern.
The effort began in 2022, when Republican state senator Eric Buckson lobbied for the Rodney statue to find a new home accessible to the public. “He was a very famous, influential, important Delawarean,” Buckson tells Mother Jones. He acknowledged that Rodney had enslaved people, but noted, “just tell the truth and decide how it is that you want that to be presented. I think we can do both. I know we can.”
After being told the statue was unlikely to be re-erected in Wilmington, Buckson identified a federally maintained park in Kent County, where Rodney lived. “That led to me writing a letter to the federal Park Service, inquiring about the process,” he says.
Rather than greenlight the statue’s move to the state capitol in Dover, America 250, an organization Congress charged with organizing events for the semiquincentennial celebration, had a different idea: temporarily moving the statue to Freedom Plaza in DC. Buckson says the conversation with the Commission began roughly a year ago, last summer.
The DC beautification plan launched by NPS, with $50 million to rehab to parks and fountains around the city, also included a contract of $7 million to Terra Constructs, a Front Royal, Virginia, based firm, to refurbish Freedom Plaza, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the site of the January 5, 2021 rally by Trump supporters that preceded the President’s better-known rally and ensuing attack on the Capitol the next day.
According to sources and documents obtained by Mother Jones, the plans for Freedom Plaza originally included just 12 statues. But shortly after it was awarded, NPS modified the contract to include a stone base on which to mount the Rodney statue. “The Trump administration has been committed to celebrating and acknowledging the full breadth of our nation’s history, including the story of Caesar Rodney and his pivotal ride in July 1776,” an Interior Department spokesperson said.
The spokesperson did not respond to questions about why the Rodney statue’s installation was not included in the original contract, which was finalized in December. But a department official acknowledged that once the initial contract was awarded, it made more sense for it to be modified “to include the work on the statue than bringing in a separate company to work in the same space.”
In an April 6 document laying out the “record of negotiations” between the construction firm and the National Parks Service, the project manager stated that the initial independent government estimate for the statue base was $286,549.
The document revealed that the government estimate had failed to include necessary services, such as the “geotechnical investigations” the firm needed to complete to ensure the statue’s stability. But the project manager also indicated that the agency did not have sufficient time to negotiate a lower price. “Given the immediate time constraint,” she wrote, “it is not in the interest to delay work with further negotiations.”
The materials indicate that the installation took less than one day of work. For that work, to erect a base for a temporary statue, the Park Service spent more than half a million dollars. But they got it done on Trump’s schedule. “Given the expedited nature of the design,” the project manager wrote, “higher pricing can be justified.”
