Crypto News: Bw Reads: Behind America’s Very MAGA 250th

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today senior editor Laura Bliss writes about how the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 has overtaken the congressionally recognized America250 in planning several major celebrations for the semiquincentennial. Many states and performers are wary of participating. You can find the whole story online here (free!).

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The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is a surprising sight, and not only because of its remote location. The $450 million LEED-certified building rises from a rugged butte outside the hamlet of Medora, North Dakota, with a 2-acre living roof that arcs and blends into the hilltop scrub.

Crews have been working furiously to ready the site for its July Fourth debut, when, in conjunction with America’s 250th birthday celebrations, it will open to visitors who make the two-hour drive from the nearest major airport. Staff are expecting President Donald Trump to attend the grand opening, which will light up the sky with an evening drone show called “Eyes on the Stars: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West.”

The library comes with contradictions beyond the nostalgic robocopters. This monument to the man known as the conservation president — whose years as a Badlands cattle rancher forged his commitment to protecting America’s undeveloped places — was paid for in no small part by the region’s fossil-fuel riches. It’s been championed by former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who as US secretary of the interior has pushed to open public lands to drilling and mining, and has overseen the slashing of the workforce of Roosevelt’s beloved national parks. “There’s a bit of irony there,” says Doug Ellison, owner of Western Edge Books in Medora, which specializes in western US culture.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora. Source: Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library — The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora.

These are but a few of the tensions that make the new library symbolic of America’s fraught 250th birthday plans. The project’s ribbon cutting is being promoted by two groups that have been made responsible for planning and executing the national anniversary festivities and have been competing for dollars and influence. One is America250, the nonprofit arm of the US Semiquincentennial Commission that Congress has empowered to organize events celebrating the country’s founding. It gets funding from both the federal government and private backers, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers oversees it. In recent years, much of its energy has focused on securing corporate sponsorships for a set of mostly quiet, decentralized programs with themes such as volunteerism, entrepreneurship and storytelling.

The other group is Freedom 250 LLC, a subsidiary of the National Park Service’s nonprofit foundation partner. It has eclipsed America250 in terms of both public profile and, at least in the past year, public funding. Freedom 250, which Burgum’s team at Interior directed the creation of last year, has been hastily working to bring to life Trump’s dreams of a MAGA jubilee.

Freedom 250, which describes itself as nonpartisan, is staffed by a mix of longtime Republican campaign consultants, events contractors and vendors with the assistance of Trump administration officials. It’s behind the more attention-grabbing planned spectacles of the celebration, including a World’s Fair-style expo on the National Mall. That event is slated to kick off on the night of June 24 with an “America Is Back” rally starring Trump, though most of the musical acts quit soon after they were announced. Also on the Freedom 250-branded lineup: May 17’s day of Christian-saturated prayer featuring messages from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, June 14’s $60 million UFC cage fight on the White House lawn, and an ongoing convoy of “Freedom Trucks” ferrying PragerU-sponsored museum exhibits across the country. (The UFC fight night wasn’t technically linked to Freedom 250, but it used the organization’s logo and the Trump administration promoted it as part of the festivities.)

Both Freedom 250 and America250 have been jockeying for funding from some of the same sources — especially the federal government. Last July, Congress set aside $150 million in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) to celebrate the semiquincentennial, all of which was appropriated to the secretary of the interior to dispense at will. Freedom 250 has since drawn between $50 million and $60 million of that money and counting, plus another $10 million in federal grants, according to a source familiar with the organization’s finances who wasn’t authorized to discuss them. The Roosevelt Library told Bloomberg Businessweek it has received a grant directly from the National Park Service of as much as $5 million to cover its July Fourth festivities. According to Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez, Freedom 250 hasn’t allocated any funds to the library’s opening but may yet.

Freedom 250’s stamp is all over the Trump administration, and vice versa. Interior Department employees send emails with the Freedom 250 logo under their signatures. Internal agency communications viewed by Businessweek show that park rangers are being offered Freedom 250 logo pins to sport on their uniforms, an exception to the usual rules limiting pieces of flair. Park workers in the Grand Canyon and beyond have also been offered to ship out to DC and elsewhere on temporary assignment to secure and spruce up the nation’s capital for the celebrations; an email sent in early April asked facilities staff to fill out a form to indicate their interest level. And according to the Washington Post, the Department of the Interior is diverting tens of millions of dollars in park entrance fees to pay for Trump’s July Fourth plans, in addition to the already allocated $150 million — this, despite a $24 billion parks maintenance backlog.

“Department of the Interior employees are excited to participate in our nation’s 250th and have worked across our 13 bureaus to highlight American assets that are located on DOI properties,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in a statement. “It is bizarre that such a historic event celebrating our amazing country is being villainized by the liberal legacy media, but their TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] apparently forces them to try to divide the people of the greatest country in the world led by the greatest president in the history of our country — President Donald J. Trump.”

Burgum, left, and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy unveiled the Freedom 250 Grand Prix racecourse on March 9. Photographer: Matt McClain/Bloomberg — Burgum, left, and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy unveiled the Freedom 250 Grand Prix racecourse on March 9.

Meanwhile, America250 has been shut out of funding it says it was promised. A spokesperson for the organization said in an email that even though it has an agreement with the Interior Department for $50 million of the OBBBA’s $150 million, it’s received only $25 million to date. (Interior officials didn’t respond to Businessweek’s questions about how the agency has distributed funding from the bill.) Now, it appears to be using tactics that appeal directly to Burgum’s personal interests in Medora. The spokesperson said that if and when America250 receives the remaining $25 million, it will contribute $5 million to the Roosevelt Library, adding that it committed the funds last fall and that this contribution would reflect nothing more than “a longstanding partnership.”

The tug-of-war shows just how far off the rails the birthday plans have gone and how opaque their financing has become. Critics call Freedom 250’s penetration of the Interior Department one more example of how the Trump administration has bent the government to serve its own particular interests. Although it isn’t unusual for park workers to be asked to wear pins or put in overtime for special occasions, it’s unclear how collaborating with Freedom 250 is meant to benefit their work, says Charles Sams, who led the National Park Service under President Joe Biden. “When it’s an outside, private organization asking the support of the national parks to pay for private activities, that’s why I’m a little confused here,” Sams says.

Sams points out, too, that Freedom 250’s requests for staff are coming after cutbacks have reduced their numbers: “The needs in the parks that these folks may be coming from will get neglected.”

Among the sites receiving additional resources this summer is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, whose entrance sits across the highway from the library and whose personnel may be assisting with its grand opening, according to ranger Nate Hughes. Like the library, the park, which was among those affected by workforce cuts, speaks to the formative influence the Badlands had on Roosevelt, who once said he “never would have been president” if not for his experiences there. And America wouldn’t be what it is at 250 had Roosevelt not become president when it was halfway there. Many longtime locals have been left gazing at what they see as Burgum’s pet project on a hill, wondering what Teddy would make of all the fuss. As with the question of what America means at 250, everyone has a different answer.

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