A historical preservation group is asking a federal judge to halt President Donald Trump’s fast-moving plan to add a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the White House, arguing the administration skipped legally required reviews and ignored congressional authority over federal property.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization chartered by Congress to safeguard historic sites, filed its lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Washington. It said Trump ordered the demolition of the East Wing annex this fall without any of the environmental or design reviews that federal law demands.
The group also contends the White House hasn’t sought approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts, which currently has no sitting members after Trump fired them in October.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not President Biden, and not anyone else. And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in,” the Trust says in its complaint, adding that the project “should be immediately halted.”
The group is seeking a temporary restraining order to stop all construction while the case proceeds.
The challenge marks the first major legal test of Trump’s $300 million project, which is funded mainly by wealthy donors and has a new architect.
Photos from the site show heavy machinery operating daily, and Trump has bragged that crews are running “all day, all night.”
“If a ballroom were constructed, similar to that which the defendants in this action have proposed to be built on the former site of the East Wing, it would cause permanent and irreparable harm to the White House and President’s Park,” Alison Hoagland, an architectural historian, said in a restraining order motion. “To have an adjacent structure overshadowing the White House, exceeding it in height and massing, would diminish the primacy of the White House, which makes its architectural statement through its singularity on the landscape.”
The White House has dismissed objections as partisan and insists Trump can remake the grounds as he sees fit because the project doesn’t use taxpayer dollars. Officials say they will consult federal review boards “at the appropriate time,” though they have not said when.
“President Trump has full legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House – just like all of his predecessors did,” Davis Ingle, a spokesperson for the White House, told NOTUS on Friday.
Polling has shown the ballroom is unpopular. Even some conservatives have asked why the Trump administration bulldozed part of the White House without a public review.
Carol Quillen, CEO and president of the Trust, told The Washington Post that the organization doesn’t object to a ballroom outright, only to bypass the public process designed to protect a building that belongs to everyone.
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