Democrats Eye Courts and Budgets to Stop Trump's Arch, Ballroom and Golf Course Plans
With a House majority coming, Democrats vow to fight what they call vanity projects, while most of the construction fights already sit in court.
President Donald Trump's push to remake Washington, D.C., has dominated his second term, even after his party's resounding midterm defeat, and Democrats who are about to take over the House say they intend to push back. The question is how much they can actually stop.
Trump began election week at the Reflecting Pool, which has been dogged by scandal, and ended it with an order declaring his gilded Oval Office a national monument to "make it impossible for anybody ever to destroy this incredible space." Like any executive order, that proclamation could be undone by a future president. Many of his construction projects, however, are changing the capital in more permanent ways.
His administration has already felled hundreds of trees at East Potomac Park and demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for a ballroom, which Trump called "the safest place in Washington" when he showed it to reporters the day after the midterms.
Trump has taken a uniquely unilateral approach to building, packing regulatory commissions with allies and bypassing Congress entirely. Most of the projects, from the triumphal arch to the Kennedy Center, are now playing out in court. Critics accuse the administration of skirting federal laws and misleading judges in an effort to move as fast as possible before his term ends.
Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over public lands and national parks, told NPR the administration has "played this game of Catch Me If You Can, where they roll ahead with the bulldozers and the tree cutters" and then wait for courts to shut them down. A Democratic Congress will fight back, he said. "There's no way that we could look away while these sacred, iconic places are being permanently changed in ways that violate the law and could have really terrible lasting impacts."
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle answered in an email that "no other president has done more to beautify our Nation's interior than President Trump." He pointed to park cleanups, the Reflecting Pool, the White House helipad and the ballroom, and said Democrats "should work with President Trump to make our nation's capital beautiful again."
Democrats have vowed to use their incoming majority to scrutinize what they call Trump's vanity projects. Oversight hearings and spending decisions are the tools within a House majority's reach, though the projects the administration has already built cannot easily be reversed. Whether courts halt the rest before demolition and construction outrun them is now the central test.
