I couldn’t stop thinking about one image from this year’s Fourth of July.
Not the fireworks.
The fences.
For the first time, America’s birthday on the National Mall was framed by miles of ominous black anti-climb fencing. Not the waist-high barricades we’ve come to expect at parades. Eight-foot steel walls. The kind of fencing Americans associate with presidential inaugurations, civil unrest, and high-security events. This year, it surrounded the nation’s birthday.
Symbols matter.
The National Mall isn’t just another park. It is America’s front yard. It is where we gather to celebrate, protest, mourn, and remember. It was designed to be open. To invite people in.
This year, families walked through security checkpoints to celebrate freedom.
Visitors passed through magnetometers to watch fireworks.
The Smithsonian museums, among the most accessible cultural institutions in the world, suddenly became harder to reach because simply crossing the Mall required navigating a maze of fences and controlled entry points.
And all of this unfolded during a dangerous heat wave. Families walked farther in oppressive temperatures, searching for water, shade, and the next checkpoint.
Think about that image for a moment.
On Independence Day, Americans celebrated liberty behind steel fencing.
That image becomes even harder to ignore when placed alongside another reality. As the country experiences increasingly dangerous heat, the federal government is slowing or halting major renewable energy projects while encouraging expanded fossil fuel production. Reasonable people can debate those policies. But they cannot ignore the symbolism.
A hotter country. A more heavily fortified public square. Less freedom of movement. More security infrastructure.
Then I found myself asking what I thought was a simple question. Who owns all those fences?
Not who ordered them. We know that. The Secret Service directed the security plan. Who supplied them? Who was paid to transform America’s front yard into a fortress?
It turns out that answer is surprisingly difficult to find.
I spent part of the weekend searching federal procurement databases, contract records, and public spending reports. The trail quickly disappeared. The closest I found was a previously released Secret Service procurement obtained through the Freedom of Information Act involving an earlier fencing deployment. The document had been heavily redacted, including key information about the fencing contractor and deployment.
For this year’s Fourth of July, I couldn’t identify the contractor through public procurement records at all.
Why? These aren’t classified weapons systems. They’re fences.
They stood in plain sight. Millions of Americans walked past them, photographed them, and celebrated behind them. Yet the companies supplying them and the contracts paying for them remain remarkably difficult to identify.
That should concern all of us. Transparency shouldn’t end where the fencing begins.
If the federal government is going to normalize surrounding the National Mall with miles of anti-climb steel fencing for our national birthday, the public should know who built the perimeter, who was paid, how much it cost, and why that information is so difficult to uncover.
Every fence has a justification. Every checkpoint has a rationale. Viewed individually, each decision may seem reasonable.
History, however, rarely changes because of one decision.
It changes because hundreds of small decisions gradually redefine what feels normal.
The image that stays with me from this Fourth of July isn’t the fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument.
It’s that they exploded above a wall of black steel. Freedom wasn’t just celebrated. It was fenced in.
