Fifteen years ago, federal officials approved the idea of building a memorial on the Washington Mall to honor Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general and president, and they later selected one of America’s foremost architects to design it. But the memorial is still far from being built, and congressional critics have come forward in recent days to depict it as just another Washington boondoggle or, in the words of a new report, “a five-star folly.”
In a 58-page report, the House Natural Resources Committee criticized the commission charged with creating the memorial for having already spent $41 million on the task, a third of which, it said, went to the design firm led by Frank Gehry, arguably the country’s most prominent architect.
