Did the construction firm in charge of the White House East Wing demolition call out President Trump over unpaid balances for their services in demolishing the historic building? No, that's not true: The website that made the claim is full of fake clickbait stories. The text of the article appears to be likely AI generated. The company mentioned in the article has a similar name but is not the company performing the demolition of the East Wing of the White House.
The claim appeared in a November 5, 2025 post on X.com account @EastEndJoe article (archived here). It opened with a caption above a screenshot of a news article that read:
Stevie Wonder could've seen this coming...😂
ACECO Engineering & Construction, the firm in charge of the White House East Wing demolition, has called out President Donald Trump over unpaid balances for their services in demolishing the historic building.
This is what the post looked like on X.com at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of x.com/EastEndJoe.)
The screenshot in the post is from an article published Nov. 4, 2025, on USAmidia.com (archived here) titled, "ACECO Engineering & Construction, the firm in charge of the White House East Wing demolition, has called out President Donald Trump over unpaid balances for their services in demolishing the historic building."
Lead Stories ran the text from the article through AI detection tools on GPTZero.me and the results said that snippet was 100% likely written by AI, as this screenshot shows:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of GPTZero.me website.)
A Google search for the company mentioned in the article "ACECO Engineering & Construction" leads to ACECO (archived here), a construction company based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. That company is not the one doing the demolition of the East Wing at the White House. While the name is similar, the company that is doing the demolition of the East Wing at the White House is Maryland based company ACECO.
The image on the right of the post is an Associated Press image of the construction at the White House that was published by the Baltimore Sun (archived here) on October 24, 2025. That article identified ACECO based in Silver Springs, Maryland, as the company performing the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, as this screenshot shows:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Baltimore Sun website.)
Using a reverse image search of the image on the left side in the article and in the post on X.com, matches an image used by ACECO LLC vice president of estimating Hayes Merkert on his LinkedIn Page (archived here).
This is the image from the article:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of USAmidia.com website.)
This is a screenshot from Merkert's LinkedIn page with the same image from the article and social media post:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of linkedin.com/hayesmerkert.)
On November 7, 2025, the ACECO website had a message that reads, "THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION." An archived version of the website from May 24, 2025 on the Wayback Machine shows their work on construction projects around the Washington, D.C. area.
There is no evidence that ACECO released a statement saying that the President Trump has not paid the business for their services in demolishing the historic building. Lead Stories searched Google News' index of thousands of news websites and found no reports the company saying Trump was not paying for the demolition. Similarly, the Yahoo! News index of partner news sites and news services showed no matching news reports of ACECO saying Trump wasn't paying for their services.
