Nothing can stop Donald Trump’s administration from building a massive ballroom on the White House grounds, even if courts find that the government illegally demolished the East Wing and started construction on the $400 million project without permission from Congress, according to the Department of Justice.
The work has simply moved too quickly for anyone to intervene, government lawyers argued in a federal appeals court Friday.
What if Trump bulldozes the Statue of Liberty before anyone has a chance to sue and stop him? “Nothing can be done?” asked Judge Patricia Millett.
“I think that’s right, yes,” replied Justice Department lawyer Yaakov Roth.
The Trump administration has argued throughout the legal battle over the ballroom that no one has any legal standing to challenge the project once the demolition started, though a federal judge in March argued that there is no law that “comes close” to giving Trump the authority to build on the property without congressional approval.
Roth argued that nobody has grounds to sue because they won’t like “how it looks,” which he called a “classic, generalized grievance.”
But what happens if the government loses its case a year from now? “Would the government’s view be, ‘OK, we can take it down?’” Millet, who was appointed by Barack Obama, asked. “Your position is, ‘This can’t be stopped by a court?’”
Only Congress could stop it, according to Roth. But it would’ve been too late for anyone to intervene “even on day one” of demolition, he argued.
The appeals court temporarily allowed construction to continue while the legal battle plays out after a lower-court injunction stalled construction.
But the Trump administration has revealed in court filings that the ballroom isn’t the primary purpose for the project. Instead, the government is building a sprawling underground bunker with military installations on the site.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has not prevented the government from continuing work on the bunker. The plaintiff in the case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, never objected to that part of the project.
In March, Leon ruled any new construction requires congressional approval, regardless of whether the president plans to use private or public dollars to fund his ballroom.
The appellate panel — which also includes Joe Biden appointee Brad Garcia and Trump appointee Neomi Rao — is now deciding whether to continue blocking the administration from building the president’s ballroom.
“The answer is Congress, as the Constitution, numerous federal statutes and longstanding Supreme Court precedent regarding the president’s supposed emergency powers all make clear,” lawyers for the National Trust for Historic Preservation wrote in a brief to the court.
In a recent four-page filing, the Justice Department said that the ballroom is “a knitted, unified, cohesive part of the East Wing Project, which is vital for National Security, and is being constructed to ensure that the President can perform his constitutional duties in a safe and heavily secured facility.”
Government lawyers then complained about previously being forced by the court to reveal “top secret” details about the project — and then repeatedly listed them.
Those plans include “heavy steel, drone-proof roof, missile-resistant and drone-proof columns, bullet, ballistic, and blast-proof glass, Military-grade venting for air conditioning and heating.”
There are also plans for “bomb shelters, a state of the art hospital and medical facilities, Top Secret military installations, structures, and equipment, protective partitioning, and other features,” lawyers wrote.
The ballroom’s rooftop will also be “hermetically sealed to prevent malign forces from contaminating the circulating air, thereby threatening the lives of those inside.”
“All of these and other specifications would have been kept secret, as is appropriate, but have been forced to be revealed to stave off the Court’s dangerous injunction,” lawyers wrote.
The Justice Department also said that “many patriotic private donors” have pledged “hundreds of millions of dollars“ to support the project, but a watchdog group has found that the administration awarded more than $50 billion in new and increased government contracts to corporate donors to the project.
More than half of the 27 publicly identified donors have been awarded new or expanded federal contracts since construction work began, according to a watchdog group’s report.
Fourteen corporate donors saw their government business grow in the first six months with contracts worth a combined $50 billion, new analysis from Public Citizen reveals.
The administration also asked for $1 billion from taxpayers for White House security additions, including for the ballroom.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the proposal is too “complex and large in scale” to be included in broader funding legislation, and Republicans abruptly left Washington, D.C. before Memorial Day after reaching an impasse over the president’s plans while also balking at the price tag for a newly launched $1.8 billion compensation fund for his political allies.
Neither of those funding requests made it into a final piece of legislation.
