“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” reads a pointed opinion handed down Tuesday (31 March) by Washington, DC, district court judge Richard J. Leon, halting further construction on president Donald Trump’s East Wing ballroom project—apart from any work necessary for safety and security reasons—until it receives congressional approval.
The 35-page ruling—which includes 19 exclamation points, perhaps as a nod to the president’s favourite punctuation mark—comes just two days ahead of a planned meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission on 2 April, when the project is expected to clear its final administrative hurdle. White House lawyers were given 14 days to file an appeal to the injunction, which they did within a few hours. Based on comments made by Judge Leon during arguments, it is expected that the case could end up being heard by the Supreme Court.
The decision was welcomed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration soon after the East Wing was demolished, and amended its complaint after it was dismissed. “This is a win for the American people on a project that forever impacts one of the most beloved and iconic places in our nation,” said Carol Quillen, the National Trust’s president and chief executive.
Taking to his networking platform, Truth Social, Trump decried the outcome in a circuitous post that also brought up the Kennedy Center and the US Federal Reserve building, questioning why the National Trust had sued him while “all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“This case, in essence, is about whether the President has the authority to build a ballroom on White House grounds with private funds without seeking authorisation from Congress,” Judge Leon wrote in his opinion, citing the US constitution as evidence for why that is invalid. “Together, the Property Clause, the Appropriations Clause and the District Clause establish Congress's primacy over federal property, spending and the District of Columbia.”
The government’s reading of the law “assumes that Congress has granted nearly unlimited power to the President to construct anything, anywhere on federal land in the District of Columbia, regardless of the source of funds”, the judge writes. “This clearly is not how Congress and former Presidents have managed the White House for centuries, and this Court will not be the first to hold that Congress has ceded its powers in such a significant fashion!”
The judge criticised the government’s main argument in its defense of the ballroom’s construction: that a federal statute allows the president to make repairs, alterations and improvements to the executive residence at the White House up to a Congressionally approved sum of nearly $2.5m. “Defendants point to ‘alteration’ and ‘improvement’, arguing that these terms are ‘capacious’ and permit the President to ‘modify’ the White House and ‘make [it] better’, including by constructing entirely new buildings like the ballroom,” Judge Leon wrote. “A brazen interpretation, indeed!”
The list of actions the president is authorised to take to maintain the White House includes words like “care, maintenance, repair” and “air-conditioning, heating and lighting”, the judge pointed out, which “bring to mind things like replacing the lightbulbs, fixing broken furniture and changing the wallpaper, not wholesale demolition of entire buildings and construction of new ones”.
The judge also dismissed the government’s argument that construction delays would undermine national security. “While I take seriously the Government’s concerns regarding the safety and security of the White House grounds and the President himself,” Judge Leon writes, “the existence of a ‘large hole’ beside the White House is, of course, a problem of the President's own making!”
The judge decided that until congress blesses the project, construction must stop.
“The President may at any time go to Congress to obtain express authority to construct a ballroom and to do so with private funds. Indeed, Congress may even choose to appropriate funds for the ballroom, or at least decide that some other funding scheme is acceptable. Either way, Congress will thereby retain its authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the Government’s spending. The National Trust’s interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated. And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles,” the judge wrote. “Not a bad outcome, that!”
