White House seeks corporate sponsors for annual Easter Egg Roll
After discovering that it can just sell electric cars nobody wants on the White House lawn without penalty, the White House is opening its doors to corporate sponsorship for this year’s Easter Egg Roll. Per CNN, which obtained a nine-page document sent to sponsorship hopefuls, the production company running the White Easter Egg Roll, Harbinger (which carries the suitable air of menace that matches the administration), is soliciting corporate sponsors for this year’s event, allowing corporations to buy even more goodwill with the administration through $75,000 to $200,000 sponsorships. Gone are the days of shoving Sean Spicer into an Easter Bunny costume and hoping for the best. This is a prime branding opportunity for corporations looking to get their logos in front of important eyeballs in government and on the Egg Hunt field.
But wait, there’s more. Sponsors will also nab the “naming rights for key areas or elements;” logo placement on event signage; branded baskets, snacks, beverages, and souvenirs; and acknowledgment in event communications, social media posts, press releases, and media interviews. How will Lockheed Martin or SpaceX ever turn down the opportunity to be mentioned in an official Truth Social post? That’s not all: call now and gain access to an “invite-only brunch hosted inside the White House by FLOTUS,” tickets to the Roll, and a tour of the White House, where presumably DOGE staffers will fire, rehire, and re-fire sponsors they mistook for government employees.
The solicitation of corporate sponsors, much like the Tesla firesale out of the White House earlier this month, is another unprecedented deviation from whatever slim separations existed between politics and corporations. While the Roll has played host to what CNN calls “smaller scale partnerships with organizations like NASA, the LEGO Foundation, and Disney,” the solicitation is a new wrinkle. Speaking to CNN, Donald Sherman, the chief counsel and executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said, “I understand that there are corporate sponsors for the Easter Egg Roll. What I have not seen before is sort of the outright solicitation and the use of the imprimatur of the White House to give corporate sponsorship.”
None of this is surprising. It’s also far from the most disturbing actions the administration has taken thus far. The Egg Roll has always been a privately funded event, avoiding tax dollars by splitting the cost between the National Park Service, the White House Historical Association, the White House, and the American Egg Board, which donated the eggs. Considering the surging egg prices, we understand why the White House needs to get creative. It worked for Tesla.