House bill strips funds to build Eisenhower memorial near Capitol | McClatchy Washington Bureau

A House of Representatives panel unveiled a bill Tuesday that provides no funding to construct a monument in the nation’s capital to the 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower.

In February, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission had requested $44.8 million from Congress for fiscal year 2017, including $1.8 million for the commission’s operations.

In its draft Interior and Environment Appropriations bill, the House Appropriations Committee stripped the funding for the memorial but extended the authority to build it on a 4-acre site at the base of Capitol Hill.

In a statement Tuesday, the commission said the House draft bill “does not recognize the significant progress” toward building the memorial. The commission said it had raised a third of its goal of $25 million in private funds for the “shovel-ready” project.

“We are ready to start construction,” said Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the commission. “We have donor funds in the bank.”

However, an ongoing dispute between the Eisenhower family and architect Frank Gehry, who designed the memorial, has slowed progress on its completion. In 2011, Eisenhower’s granddaughters Susan and Anne objected to Gehry’s design, which includes stainless steel mesh tapestries that depict scenes of Eisenhower’s childhood home of Abilene, Kansas.

Though a modified design was approved by the National Capital Planning Commission last year, it has numerous critics in Congress who want to start over.

Eisenhower, or “Ike,” was the supreme allied commander in World War II, leading the D-Day invasion in France in 1944. He was elected president twice, in 1952 and 1956.

Roberts said the memorial would be dedicated in time for the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in 2019. That year will also mark 50 years since Eisenhower’s death.

Former Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole, a World War II veteran and the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, is leading the fundraising effort for the memorial.

In a column in The Washington Times newspaper last fall, Dole wrote that Eisenhower was a hero to the 16 million Americans who’d fought in the war and that a memorial should be built before they’re all gone.

According to the National World War II Museum, fewer than 700,000 remain, including Dole, 92.

“Now, 70 years later, I want the country I fought for to honor Ike in our nation’s capital,” Dole wrote. “I believe it is past time that Ike be memorialized and that the Eisenhower Memorial be funded and built.”