According to Business Insider, the US government will spend almost $500,000 on a deep clean of the White House before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, CNN reported, citing government contracts it had viewed.
The building has been the center of three COVID-19 outbreaks.
A deep clean between administrations is expected. A deep clean between presidents is usually carried out by White House staff in the six-hour slot when both the incoming and outgoing presidents are at the inauguration ceremony, but this time it's different.
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The incoming administration is contracting extra companies to help at this scale is unprecedented in modern times, presidential historian Kate Brower Andersen told ABC.
"There's always been a deep clean between administrations, but we've never seen anything like this," Brower told ABC News' "Powerhouse Politics" podcast.
The White House has 132 rooms spread over six stories. This includes 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, and 28 fireplaces.
Why the deep cleaning?
Americans have witnessed Donald Trump’s disregard of the COVID-19 coronavirus and the initial methods to prevent it. He went on to try and discredit his own coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci, while his cabinet has refused to wear masks at the White House, and there have been multiple White House outbreaks over the past year.
More than 130 individuals serving across his Secret Service detail have fallen ill, not to mention the president himself.
As it turns out, Biden took more precautions than most presidents, and budgeted more than $100,000 to outright replace the carpeting through much of the White House. But how do you launder a fine rug or drapery to ensure it’s sterile? In a word, heat.
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“Going with something like a thermal tool would be best, because you aren’t going to damage the fabric,” says Andrea Armani, the Ray Irani Chair in Engineering and Materials Science and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the USC. “That’s basically how they clean linens in hospitals. They take the sheets, put them in a high temperature oven, and clean them with steam.”
The White House has been through many different health crises throughout the years, but as the furniture and decorations continue to become more delicate, the more intricate the cleaning process has to be.
“Let’s put it this way, when we were dealing with smallpox in a big way in this country back in the 1800s, the situation was such that we recognized its airborne spread. But it’s the blankets we gave the Native Americans that killed most people,” Armani says. “[COVID-19] has that potential. It’s going to take us some years, I believe, to tease that out. This is a novel organism, we still don’t know a lot about it.”
To clean White House surfaces, it is suggested the cleaning staff might use vaporized hydrogen peroxide, fogging the room with disinfectant to top every surface with COVID-killing chemical. Technically, that would work pretty well—as it does in hospitals—but it would be devastatingly harsh on antiques.
“[With something like] the Lincoln Desk, you can’t just clean that with hydrogen peroxide,” says Armani, in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s desk, still found in his room on the second floor of the White House. “The hardest to clean surfaces are wood surfaces. You can’t take a desk and put that in a washing machine.”
In this case, experts agree the most delicate solution would be UVC-light, and perhaps using wands to manually shine light onto the furniture.
“It’s going to be a very slow process…and you have to worry about the person cleaning that surface,” says Armani, alluding to the burns that UVC can inflict on human skin, while also urging a cleaning staff to make sure they get into the nooks and crannies of hard furniture.
