1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

Launch a formal investigation into the Freedom 250 event on the National Mall. Congress created the America 250 commission in 2016 — a bipartisan body specifically tasked with coordinating the nation's official 250th anniversary celebrations. Trump sidelined that legitimate commission and replaced it with a for-profit, partisan event that funneled the prestige of a national landmark into what looks like a personal grift. The event itself was a fiasco: power outages shut down the Ferris wheel for roughly two hours on June 25, electrical failures melted the ice cream, booths sat empty, and attendance was sparse. Most musical acts canceled after learning the event was partisan in nature. Fox News reportedly mislabeled it as "America 250," blurring the line between a private commercial venture and an official government commemoration. That kind of deliberate confusion about what is and isn't a government-sanctioned event is exactly what oversight exists to catch. The American people deserve a real, nonpartisan celebration of this country's 250th birthday — not a branded cash grab held on public land. I want a full accounting of how Freedom 250 was authorized to use the National Mall, who profited, and what happened to the America 250 commission's mandate. This needs to be investigated now, before Summer 2026 arrives and the same playbook gets run again on a much larger scale.