Good morning. Two huge earthquakes shook Venezuela last night, crumpling buildings, killing at least 32 people and injuring 700 others. The full extent of the damage was not clear, but one of the quakes was the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century. Frantic rescue efforts are underway now.

There’s more below. Before we get to it, though, I’d like to turn to my Morning colleague Evan Gorelick to tell you about the remodeling of Washington, D.C.

Makeover money

Many of you have written in to ask about President Trump’s construction projects in Washington. Linda from Virginia wanted to know how the administration has been paying for them. Sheila from Connecticut wondered whether taxpayers were footing the bill.

Details about these grand public undertakings have dribbled out rather un-grandly. The government’s finance wizards have revised and re-revised, and in some cases re-re-revised, their cost estimates. It’s all about as clear as the algae-clouded water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

With no public accounting of the entire construction spree, a team of Times reporters — Luke Broadwater, Marco Hernandez, Junho Lee and Elena Shao — set out to produce one. They found that the Trump administration had mobilized at least $1.2 billion on no fewer than 18 major projects across the nation’s capital. Here’s everything we know, and everything we don’t, about their budgetary provenance.

East Wing ballroom: $400 million from private donors, or maybe taxpayers. Since Trump razed the East Wing in October to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the costs have piled up. Initially, the government said the project would run $200 million; now, its price tag has doubled. Trump first said that money would come from donors, and the White House even released a list of them. But officials refused to disclose how much each donor had actually contributed, and Republicans on Capitol Hill have offered up taxpayer money instead.

Bunker and security center: $400 million from taxpayers. The president asked Senate Republicans to approve payment for security enhancements, including a “massive” military bunker beneath his planned ballroom. That money was later cut out of a spending bill, but the Trump administration has since transferred more than $350 million from the Secret Service budget to pay for some of the upgrades.

The finances get even hazier for other ventures on Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump has renovated the Lincoln Bedroom, the Palm Room, the Oval Office and more, but he has not disclosed those costs.

Kennedy Center: $250 million from taxpayers. Trump secured funding from Congress to renovate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, then slapped his own name on its facade before a judge ordered that it be removed. The president proposed shutting down the center for two years to complete his renovations, but the judge blocked that plan, too.

Garden of American Heroes: At least $40 million from taxpayers and unclear sources. Trump wants to build reflecting pools, plazas, dining facilities and an amphitheater — alongside 250 life-size statues of notable Americans — at West Potomac Park. Congress has approved $40 million for the project, but the statues alone could cost that much, according to the administration’s estimates. It’s not clear where funding for the rest of the project would come from.

Trump is also spending millions to remodel the Reflecting Pool (travails of which The Times has documented), the Lincoln Memorial and fountains around the city.

Face value

The aggregate cost of these projects is relatively small compared with, say, the country’s $31 trillion in debt or the $5 trillion we’ve already spent this fiscal year-to-date. Yet it commands an outsize share of our attention. This money is being used to remake some of the most photographed real estate in the country — owned, in a sense, by the American public. So seeing it change is a little like waking up to a surprise nose job; it’ll give you a jolt, for good or ill.

The urge to remake the capital in one’s own image is ancient. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, is said to have boasted that he “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” To fund his works, he often drew from his own fortune and from the private pocketbooks of the city’s elites, so as not to drain the public treasury.

Trump’s coffers are murkier. The White House declined to answer many of our reporters’ questions about funding for his projects, but suggested that taxpayer money would likely be used for most of them.

Read more about the economics of his Washington makeover. (We’ve made this link free for Morning readers. There are other free links in today’s newsletter, too.)

VENEZUELA EARTHQUAKES

Two major earthquakes struck Venezuela last night, killing at least 32 people and injuring at least 700. But those numbers do not include the hardest-hit region, La Guaira, where dozens of buildings have collapsed. And at least two smaller earthquakes have been recorded since the large ones.

Residents described scenes of terror and confusion as buildings shook and the power went out. “I’ve never felt something so strong,” said one woman from San Felipe, near the earthquake’s epicenter. She told The Times it lasted for more than a minute and that the back part of her house fell in. President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency. You can follow updates here.

For 250 years, America has been a restless improvisation — a nation reshaped by immigration, war and economic and cultural upheavals. Times Opinion writers each picked a piece of this complicated history that represents the best of what this country can be, including:

Nicholas Kristof on our public lands. Tressie McMillan Cottom on our libraries. Ross Douthat on our sports. M. Gessen on our righteous anger. John McWhorter on our musical theater. Read all of those, and more, here.

MORNING READS

Pantry cooking at its most colorful: harissa chickpeas with turmeric rice. Just toast your rice with butter, turmeric and garlic, and then simmer it in broth until it’s done. While it burbles, roast your chickpeas in olive oil spiked with a harissa spice blend — homemade or store-bought. Get some spinach in there at the end to wilt, and brighten everything up with a squeeze of lemon.

VISIONS OF AMERICA

For America’s 250th birthday, The New York Times Magazine asked seven leading historians to profile a founding-era American whose story has rarely been told.

Kathleen DuVal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, highlighted the life of Mercy Otis Warren, a patriot housewife in Massachusetts who in 1772 wrote an anti-tyrannical play that was published anonymously in a local newspaper. It was a hit, captivating readers “by elevating their personal grievances with British rule by using classical tropes and symbolic language,” and it inspired other plays and writings as the new nation began to build itself. Alexander Hamilton would later write to Warren, “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”

Read more about Warren, and six other founding Americans, here. It’s a free link.

More on culture

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Listen to “The Last 12 Weeks,” a five-part podcast series from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project and The Times. It follows a capital defense team in Texas racing to stop the execution of David Wood, known as the “Desert Killer.”

Use your smartwatch to track the health metrics that matter to your doctor. (This link is free).

Reduce shoulder pain. We’ve got seven exercises to improve your strength and mobility.