Obama Presidential Center’s $470 Million Pledge To Protect Taxpayers Is Nearly Empty
When the Obama Foundation secured approval to build its presidential center on 19.3 acres of Chicago’s historic Jackson Park, it promised taxpayers a massive financial safeguard: a $470 million reserve fund to ensure the city would never be on the hook if the project faltered.
But new filings reveal the foundation has deposited only $1 million into that endowment — just 0.21% of the pledged total — and hasn’t added a single dollar since 2021. The revelation has triggered alarm that Chicago taxpayers could end up footing the bill for a project whose price tag has already ballooned from $330 million to at least $850 million.
The fund was supposed to protect the public from financial liability when the city handed over prime parkland in a 2018 sweetheart deal that gave the foundation control of the site for just $10 under a 99-year lease. Despite that bargain, watchdogs say the Obama Foundation has flouted its commitments while city officials have looked the other way.
Illinois GOP Chair Kathy Salvi called the situation an “abomination,” blasting Democrats for once again leaving taxpayers exposed: “It should come as no surprise that the Obama Center is potentially leaving Illinois taxpayers high and dry — it’s an Illinois Democrat tradition. Democrats in this state, when not going to prison for corruption, treat taxpayers like a personal piggy bank giving sweetheart deals to their political benefactors.”
Legal experts have also raised red flags. Richard Epstein, University of Chicago law professor emeritus and an adviser to the nonprofit Protect Our Parks, said the foundation’s failure to build the endowment validates long-standing warnings about the project.
“They put a million dollars into a $400 million endowment, so it’s endowed. That gets you in jail as a securities matter,” Epstein told Fox News Digital. “An endowment means that you have the money in hand. But they have nothing. They just have the same $1 million that they put in in 2021 as far as I can tell. So, I regard this as something of a public calamity.”
Endowments are designed to generate investment income to cover annual expenses without dipping into the principal. By failing to establish the reserve, Epstein warns, the center could face recurring financial instability, leaving the public vulnerable. “Without an endowment, they’ll have to scramble every year to cover $30 million in operating costs. The whole point of an endowment is to avoid that volatility. They just haven’t endowed it. Of that I’m 100% sure.”
If the Obama Foundation collapses or the center stalls, Epstein said, the fallout could be devastating: unfinished construction, costly environmental impacts, and long-term traffic disruptions. “Nobody knows exactly who is responsible for what if the project is abandoned or incomplete. There is a risk that the public will then have to bear that loss because the foundation won’t have the money.”
Despite these risks, the city continues to label the foundation “compliant” on the endowment requirement — a move critics say proves officials never intended to enforce the rules in the first place.
What was pitched as a shining monument to Barack Obama’s legacy may instead become a costly liability for Chicago residents — a half-built vanity project subsidized by taxpayers.