By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report | National
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Trump administration cannot continue above-ground construction on a ballroom at the White House without approval from Congress, delivering the most significant legal setback yet to one of the president’s signature building projects. The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with historic preservation advocates who sued to stop the roughly 90,000-square-foot structure, which has already begun rising on the site of the former East Wing.
Judges Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, and Brad Garcia, a Biden appointee, wrote Friday’s joint majority opinion, finding that, “at this preliminary stage, the National Trust has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House — the People’s House — to fit a particular President’s desires.” The ruling upholds an earlier April 16 order from U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, halting above-ground work while allowing underground construction, including a bunker and other “national security facilities,” to continue.
How the fight started
The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed suit on December 12, 2025, arguing the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by demolishing the East Wing and pressing ahead with construction without consulting the National Capital Planning Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts, without an environmental assessment, and without congressional approval. The National Capital Planning Commission, whose chair is a former Trump lawyer, ultimately gave the project final approval on April 2 in an 8-1 vote, over the objections of a large majority of public commenters who had signed up to weigh in.
Trump has said the ballroom, whose estimated cost has grown to roughly $400 million, is being funded through private donations from corporations and wealthy individuals, including Amazon, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Coinbase and himself. That framing has not settled the underlying legal question. His administration separately requested $1 billion in federal funds for the project, which Congress refused in May, and in June Democrats raised concerns that $350 million from an unrelated tax law appeared to have been redirected toward White House security spending that includes the ballroom.
The president’s response
Trump reacted angrily to the earlier district court ruling, posting on social media in March, “He’s saying I need congressional approval and he’s so wrong… Congressional approval has never been given on anything, in these circumstances, big or small, having to do with construction at the White House.” After that initial ruling, and following a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25, congressional Republicans introduced legislation that would explicitly authorize the ballroom, but that bill has not advanced.
The National Trust, for its part, said Friday’s ruling affirmed a fundamental principle rather than simply winning a procedural fight. “From the beginning, our position has been clear and consistent: the law states that only Congress can authorize the construction of a ballroom at the White House,” Brent Leggs, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement, calling the decision an affirmation of “the American people’s right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish.”
What happens next
The injunction is stayed for 14 days, giving the administration a short window to seek further review, whether from the full D.C. Circuit sitting en banc or from the Supreme Court, before above-ground work must stop. In the meantime, underground construction, including bunker and medical-facility work at the site, can continue uninterrupted, meaning the legal fight is unlikely to fully halt activity at the former East Wing even as it blocks the ballroom’s most visible progress.
A commission stacked in the president’s favor
The National Capital Planning Commission’s own history with the project has drawn scrutiny independent of the court fight. The 12-member commission, which includes three Trump appointees and is chaired by one of the president’s former lawyers, originally planned to vote on the ballroom in March before pushing the date back after an unusually large number of people signed up to comment, the overwhelming majority of them opposed. When the commission finally voted in April, well after Judge Leon’s initial injunction had already paused construction, it approved the project 8-1, with Chairman William Scharf noting at the time that the commission was not itself a party to the lawsuit and that the injunction did not bind its review process. Trump celebrated the vote on social media, singling out Senator Rand Paul’s approval as notable given the senator’s reputation as a difficult vote to win.
That approval did not resolve the underlying legal question the appeals court took up Friday: whether a planning commission stacked with the president’s own appointees can substitute for the congressional authorization historic preservation advocates say the law requires. The National Trust’s lawsuit treated the NCPC’s blessing as beside the point, arguing that only Congress holds the authority to approve a structural transformation of this scale at the White House, regardless of how a presidentially chaired commission votes.
The case, National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, is likely to become a defining test of how much unilateral authority a president holds over physical changes to the White House complex, a question that has taken on added weight given a separate National Park Service assessment warning that a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch elsewhere in Washington could compromise the historical character of dozens of nearby sites. For now, the ruling leaves the ballroom in the same position much of the rest of the president’s second-term building agenda occupies: publicly celebrated, financially underway, and legally unresolved.
The money question that won’t go away
Underlying the procedural fight is a financial one that has never been fully resolved. Trump has insisted the ballroom is being paid for entirely through private donations, and the administration has pointed to a roster of corporate donors, including Amazon, Palantir, Lockheed Martin and Coinbase, as evidence the project costs taxpayers nothing directly. But the administration’s own $1 billion federal funding request, rejected by Congress in May, sits uneasily alongside that framing, as does the $350 million in tax-law funds Democrats say was redirected toward White House security spending that includes the ballroom. Neither the size of the private fundraising haul nor the full accounting of how donor money and any redirected federal funds have been spent has been made fully public, leaving watchdog groups and congressional Democrats pressing for more transparency even as the legal fight over congressional authorization plays out separately.
That unresolved money trail is likely to keep the ballroom in the news well beyond this week’s ruling, regardless of how the appeals process unfolds. Whether Congress ultimately authorizes the project, the administration finds another legal path forward, or the fight drags into next year, the underlying questions, who is really paying for the People’s House to be rebuilt, and who gets to decide that it should be, remain exactly as unsettled as they were when the East Wing came down.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article’s research and drafting were assisted by AI tools, directed, fact-checked and edited by a human journalist.