The Trump administration has spent more than `$500,000 in taxpayer funds to reinstall a statue honoring Caesar Rodney, a Delaware plantation owner who enslaved nearly 200 people during his lifetime, near the plaza that also honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall — and government watchdogs say the cost and the speed at which it was done raise serious questions about how the administration is spending public money.
Rodney was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, remembered in part for completing a harrowing nearly 80-mile horseback ride while seriously ill in July 1776 to help break Delaware’s deadlocked vote on independence. But he was also an enslaver, with his family’s large plantation in Delaware operated through forced labor. His original monument stood in Wilmington, Delaware, before it was removed in 2020 during the nationwide reckoning with public statues honoring figures tied to slavery and racial oppression. His statue was one of thousands removed or debated during that period as communities across the country wrestled with who their public spaces chose to honor.
Under an executive order directing the restoration of removed monuments, the Trump administration moved to bring Rodney’s statue back and reinstall it as part of the America 250 celebrations marking the nation’s 250th birthday. The government paid a premium to expedite the process and meet a deadline connected to the July 4th anniversary festivities.
Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, criticized the justification for the accelerated timeline and its price tag. “By definition, urgency should be used when a delay would result in a serious injury to the government,” Amey said. “It’s inconceivable to think that a statue for a holiday celebration meets that standard.”
The decision to place Rodney’s statue in proximity to monuments honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the element that has drawn the sharpest reaction from civil rights advocates and historians, who argue the juxtaposition is not incidental but reflects a deliberate ideological choice about whose history the current administration believes deserves celebration in the most prominent public spaces in the country.
The reinstallation is part of a broader pattern under Trump’s second term of reversing the monument removals of 2020, including reinstalling statues of Christopher Columbus in Washington, D.C., despite historians’ documented accounts of Columbus initiating the enslavement of Indigenous people during his second voyage to the Americas.
