Senator Cory Booker went after Trump this week over the gold horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial, calling the project an obscene waste of money and an insult to every American struggling to get by. The scaffolding came down days earlier, giving Washington its first look at what $5.1 million in taxpayer money bought.
Booker’s post was short. He wrote that Trump is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to cover statues of horses in gold, and that it is an obscene waste of money and an insult to every American who is struggling to get by. The image circulating alongside it shows one of the newly gilded horses with National Guard troops standing in the foreground, which is its own commentary on what is currently happening in that city.
Here is what is actually being paid for. There are four bronze equestrian statues sitting at the entrance to Arlington Memorial Bridge, in the roads that ring the Lincoln Memorial. Two of them are called The Arts of War, individually named Valor and Sacrifice, sculpted by Leo Friedlander. The other two are The Arts of Peace. All four were a gift from Italy and were installed in 1951. The horses and riders stand about 19 feet tall and the pairs weigh roughly 80,000 pounds.
They were gilded when they arrived, and they were regilded once before, in 1971 and 1972. Nothing had been done to them since. By this year the gold had gone patchy and faded, and a 2018 study found the granite bases had developed purple staining from copper running off the aging bronze. That part matters, because this is a restoration of something that was designed to be gold rather than an invention out of nowhere. Anyone arguing the statues did not need work is arguing with a park service condition report.
What the reporting has raised questions about is how the work was bought and what it cost. In mid April, the National Park Service handed a $5.1 million contract to The Gilders’ Studio, a well regarded Maryland firm that specializes in exactly this kind of conservation. The agency awarded it without a full competition, meaning other companies were not given a real chance to bid. The government’s explanation was that there was not time to solicit other bids before the July 4 deadline. Agency documents reviewed by the outlet NOTUS, which broke the story in May, also showed the park service did not do extensive market research on whether $5.1 million was a fair price for the job.
The gold itself is unusually heavy. The statues are being covered in 23.75 karat gold leaf, applied in a layer thicker and purer than what the same studio used on the exterior of the Wyoming state capitol dome seven years ago. For scale on what this firm normally charges, its previous federal work includes a roughly $226,000 contract to regild a monument near the White House and about $82,000 to regild part of the World War I memorial.
The deadline was the whole justification, and the deadline was missed. Trump said in June that the sculptures would be fully regilded by July 3, the day before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Neither pair was finished in time. The Arts of War statues were revealed on July 27, when Trump posted photos on Truth Social of crews taking the scaffolding down. The Arts of Peace pair is not expected to be complete until the end of September, and the park service has told visitors that work and area closures around the site run through September 30.
The administration has not treated any of this as an embarrassment. The Interior Department announced the project on social media by saying it was auramaxxing Washington ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, borrowing a slang term about maximizing your presence. Trump has promoted the work repeatedly, noting at one point that the studio had flown in gilders from around the country to get it done.
The horses are also not the whole bill. According to the NOTUS reporting, the Interior Department has put at least $95 million toward beautification projects in Washington, all of it initiated between December 2025 and April of this year, and roughly $20 million of that, including the horse contract, had not been officially reported at the time. Separately, Trump has proposed a 250 foot triumphal arch between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, modeled on the Arc de Triomphe, with reported cost estimates approaching $100 million, and a proposed White House ballroom projected around $600 million.
That is the context Booker is pointing at. His argument is not that bronze statues should be allowed to rot. It is about what gets funded and how fast, at a moment when a lot of people are having trouble covering basics, and about a spending pattern where contracts move quickly, competition gets skipped, and the public finds out afterward from reporters filing document requests.
The counterargument from the administration is that these are national monuments, they were falling apart, the 250th anniversary is a legitimate occasion, and the work was going to have to happen eventually. Both of those things can be true at the same time. The statues genuinely needed restoration, and the process by which the money moved is genuinely worth questioning.
The finished product is now standing at the bridge, and the second pair is still under wraps until fall.
