美国250周年庆典：两党派对组织内部分裂

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Right now on the National Mall in Washington DC, a birthday party for America is supposed to be in full swing.

Being here at the Great American State Fair in the nation's capital, I can definitely say no one's here. It sucks.

It's not packed, but you guys have to understand this is like three football fields here that this fair is on. The Great American State Fair is a 16-day event meant to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Photos, videos, and reporting from the scene show people have had mixed experiences [music] there.

Here we go. Rodeo 250.

We're at the Great American State Fair. And as someone from the Midwest, I would like to have a word with whoever had the audacity to give it that name.

At the Great American, the Great American State embarrassment. The lackluster fair is just one of many semiquincesentennial events that have been planned in the leadup to July 4th. And Laura Bliss, a senior editor at Bloomberg Business Week, says there's turned out to be quite a range. A ball drop in Time Square, a concert at the LA Coliseum,

a fleet of 16-wheelers featuring a video message from the president,

a national volunteerism initiative,

a day of national prayer. If these celebrations seem a little disjointed, that's because they're the product of not one but two federally funded party planning organizations with competing visions that are as polarized as America itself. One is called America 250, [music] an offshoot of a semi-quincentennial commission that Congress created all the way back in 2016, and the other is called Freedom 250, which the Trump administration set up last year to throw more magoded semiquesentennial events.

Laura just published a story in Business Week that dives deep into both of these groups. It is kind of a bit of a dichotomy I think you could say of a fairly you know quiet sort of somewhat decentralized kind of politically neutral uh you know organization [music]

that's America 250

to one that is very much molded in the image of of the president

freedom 250 is the group behind the fair and the trucks for months these groups have been jockeying for influence and funding and now that the big birthday is [music] finally here. How did this two-party party party system pan out? And what does the unofficial rivalry itself say about the nation 250 years after its founding? [music] I'm Sarah Holder and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, [music] happy birthday America.

How planning for the US's 250th became tangled in [music] allegations of mismanagement and partisanship. Laura, before there were these two competing groups, there was just one, [music] the America 250 Foundation, which was set up by the US Semi-quincentennial [music] Commission. When exactly was it created and what was it supposed to do?

So, the US Semiquentennial Commission was created by an act of Congress in 2016. that was under President Obama to make sure that America's 250th birthday party was a smashing success.

The commission was made up of four Democrats and four Republican members of Congress along with 16 private citizens chosen by legislators.

You know, the vision was that this group of people representing, you know, both sides of the aisle were going to put something together that reflected the country.

But the commission got off to a rocky start. there were a lot of tensions, a lot of uh kind of feuding on on the commission very early on that potentially set it back to some extent. Um, and so some of its fundraising goals and that kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, you reported on some of those early controversies during the Biden administration, for example, four America 250 employees brought a lawsuit [music] against their bosses. Tell us a little bit about that. I think it was 2022 um that four [music] um former employees of America 250 filed a lawsuit um accusing organizations leadership of cronyism, selfdealing, u mismanagement of funds. Um there were allegations about you know having to pay out invoices for work that was never done [music] and eventually these parties did settle.

In a filing at the time, attorneys for America 250 said that the lawsuit failed to lay out any cognisable claim.

I think America 250 would say this is old. This is under previous leadership. Um, but nevertheless, I think you can point to that and just sort of see that there were problems organizationally that may have kind of slowed down the momentum in terms of planning an actual celebration.

Then came the election of Donald Trump. [music] America 250 had already gotten the ball rolling, but now a new president was in charge. [music] At first, it looked like the Trump administration and the America 250 team were going to be able to work together. [music] America 250 even sponsored Trump's birthday military parade and helped put on a cryptocurrency conference featuring Trump's sons. But pretty soon, the visions of the Trump administration and America 250 started to splinter.

The administration replaced the executive director with a very very young former Fox News producer who was fired not that long after swapping out some of the consulting groups um that were working with America 250 with um firms like Event Strategies Inc. um which is best known for organizing the January 6th rally at the capital in 2021 the stop the steel rally. Eventually, the kind of Trump administration folks largely went their own way and set up this other entity, Freedom 250, to basically achieve what the president wanted.

Freedom to 50 people will say that America 250 was ultimately not willing to kind of work with them to achieve the president's vision. America 250 people will say, you know, they're they were trying to take over the organization and, you know, we we basically wouldn't let that happen. So just at a basic level, how was Freedom 250 created and what do we know about how it's funded?

I mean, these are great questions that we actually don't have a lot of clear answers to and I think that that is core to, you know, the criticisms that have been raised by, you know, Democrats in Congress and watchdog groups about this organization. So what we do know is that Freedom 250 is a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. Um, which sounds kind of odd. Yeah. Why is that?

Uh the National Park Foundation is right is a very wellestablished long-standing nonprofit partner to the National Park Service, which means Congress recognizes it as like a foundation that can raise money and kind of do um like supportive work for this federal agency essentially. So yeah, the National Park Foundation says that you know the National Park Service um which of course is run by or overseen by the Secretary of Interior Doug Bergam um asked the foundation again their official partner to set up this Freedom 250 LLC as essentially an entity to kind of hold and transfer money.

And I should say like much like America 50 that has included both federal funding um as well as privately raised funds. Um how much we don't know exactly.

In a comment for Laura Story, a National Park Foundation spokesperson said any funds received or spent by Freedom 250 will be accounted for through the nonprofit's annual financial reporting processes.

[music]

The most visible difference between the two groups is how they've approached planning for the [music] big birthday. On the American Tiffy side, it's tentpole programming, I would say, is largely these kind of decentralized events. So that includes a [music] grand volunteerism initiative where they're trying to sort of break a new record in the number of volunteer hours logged by Americans. They have sponsored an essay writing contest [music] um awarding grade schoolers a visit to a national park.

There's a national week of flag raising. They're going to be burying a time capsule at Indepe

原文超出正文长度上限，此处截断——上游还有内容，完整版见上方「原文 ↗」。