The GSA put $253,000 into lights on a two-lane alley that hosted 10,000 guests last year. That runs $25.30 a head. I have modeled worse.
My screens have been on since 4 a.m. and I want to walk everybody through the White House bowling alley numbers, because the coverage has been strictly retail. In late July the GSA awarded roughly $253,000 for lighting work on the two-lane Truman alley under the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The White House calls it upkeep and broken fixtures, with close to 10,000 guests in twelve months. So divide. You get $25.30 a guest, and in my Lehman days that was unit economics you signed off on before the coffee cooled.
Twelve years ago the same agency proposed rebuilding those lanes and the House killed it inside one news cycle. Representative Pat Meehan of Pennsylvania said then that upgrading the president’s private bowling alley shouldn’t be a priority, and he sized that against a $17 trillion debt. I forwarded his quote to my subscriber list. Twice.
What the White House Bowling Alley Returns Per Guest
Here’s where the retail crowd loses the thread. Meehan was pricing two lanes against a $17 trillion balance sheet, and we crossed $40 trillion last month. Same asset, same two lanes, and the denominator has gone up by a factor of two and a third, which means the White House bowling alley has gotten dramatically cheaper to carry as a share of total obligations. Nobody covering this ran it that way, because nobody covering this has ever had to defend a sizing decision.
Janet asked over dinner whether that meant we could look at a boat, since our mortgage is now a smaller slice of a bigger economy. She’s an orthodontist. I explained the distinction between sovereign and household balance sheets for about eleven minutes and she got up to load the dishwasher.
Running the Comparison the Way a Desk Would
The other figure people wave around is the $878,000 that went to the same contractor the same month for a basement studio project. The listing carries no description of the work. None at all. That’s incomplete-filing risk, which I have traded through since 2009.
Somebody will send me the watchdog report, so I read it. CNBC covered the findings on August 6. The GAO went through $110 billion in claimed savings and found the estimates incorrect or unsupported, with no termination recorded on 2,503 contracts. Senator Gary Peters called the operation deceptive. Everybody skips his opening clause, which grants that all of us support rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. Of course we do. How you book a savings is a methodology argument, and I have had that exact one with my own accountant.
Pricing In the Contractor
Somebody will ask about the firm. Charles Mann Enterprises is a Washington construction management shop founded by a three-time Super Bowl champion, and it has taken at least $3 million in recent federal work on a roof and an air conditioning system. Vendor concentration is efficient. An outfit that already holds badge clearance and knows where the freight elevator is beats a stranger on execution. Preservation review for that building also moved to an office that will not be doing any of the construction, which takes a step off the critical path.
One more thing the tape is telling me. When the first lady refreshed that same alley in 2019, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America picked up the tab, private capital doing public work, and I said so at the time. Clear Alpha is down 43% cumulative since I went independent, and all 204 subscribers have had the regime conditions explained to them. My read is straightforward. At $25.30 a guest against $40 trillion, the White House bowling alley is the cleanest carry in the federal budget. But what do I know?
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