Barack Obama's presidential center has ignored its obligation to set up an endowment to protect taxpayers from financial liability, according to its records.
Just $1 million has been deposited into a reserve fund meant to bail out taxpayers in case the Obama Presidential Center fails, Fox News reported. This comes despite the center making a $470 million pledge in 2020.
With projected operating costs of up to $40 million in the first year alone, the center is resting on financial quicksand, says Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor emeritus and a New York University law professor.
Epstein has spent years advising Protect Our Parks, which has fought in vain to block the Obama Presidential Center from being built on a 20 acre-section of Jackson Park.
While a deal between the center and Chicago did not specify a dollar amount, the $1 million endowment is nowhere close to covering the center's operating budget.
"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."
Epstein says the paltry endowment - which the city has accepted as sufficient - is proof that Chicago was never serious about protecting the public when it made its deal with Obama.
The financial recklessness of the project is sure to upset locals who are already frustrated by the use of public land to build a massive gray monument to the former president. Critics have slammed the drab aesthetics of the towering structure, and many fear it will drive out poor tenants.
The project has gotten progressively more expensive over the years, with costs exploding from $330 million to at least $850 million. Meanwhile, members of Obama's inner circle have received huge payouts for serving on the board.
"It should come as no surprise that the Obama Center is potentially leaving Illinois taxpayers high and dry — it’s an Illinois Democrat tradition," Illinois GOP Chair Kathy Salvi Fox News Digital in a statement. "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."
Despite opposition from the community, the center is opening in the spring of 2026.
The Obama Presidential Center told Fox News Digital that it anticipates "significant investments in the endowment in the coming years."
"The Obama Presidential Center is fully funded, and it will open in the spring of 2026," a spokesperson for the foundation said.
