Appeals Court Orders Halt to White House Ballroom Project Construction, Requires Trump to Seek Congress’s OK
Court says Congress has not authorized the construction project or the $400 million in funds from corporations, billionaires, and anonymous donors to fund it
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered construction of the White House Ballroom Project to halt unless and until it is authorized by Congress. In a 2-1 decision, the Appeals Court panel affirmed a lower court decision, holding that the scheme for privately funding and constructing the ballroom violates a 1912 law requiring Congress to authorize all federal construction projects built in Washington, D.C. The Court rejected a series of Trump Administration arguments that Congress had implicitly authorized the project, finding: “Executive actions that take control of that property out of the hands of the people’s representatives while irreparably harming the historical and visual architecture of perhaps the most prominent public building in the United States seriously intrude on the public interest.”
In response, Public Citizen Co-President Lisa Gilbert said in a statement:
“When this president engages in lawlessness, the people have to stand up and fight back. The appalling and unlawful demolition of the People’s House horrified millions of Americans. We applaud the National Trust for Historic Preservation for its leadership in this lawsuit and are glad to see the court’s ruling affirm once again that no one, not even a President, should be above the law.”
Public Citizen Democracy Advocate Jon Golinger said in a statement:
“The court’s ruling demolishes the corrupt foundation of the Ballroom Project, which was built on abuse of power and secretive pay-to-play deals with anonymous donors. As the court said, the president is a temporary tenant of the White House, not its owner. Since this tenant has illegally trashed the place, he should be forced to pay to fix it.”
In a key part of the Court’s opinion today, the Court cited a Public Citizen case from 2007 as part of its decision: “it is easy to see why Congress has not authorized the use of private gifts (or ‘any available funds’) for major renovations at the White House. When Congress permits an agency or the President to pursue programs with donated or general funds, it necessarily gives up some of its own power to check the Executive Branch. The ‘power of the purse,’ after all, is one of Congress’s crucial means of leverage over the Executive. See Public Citizen, Inc. v. National Highway Traffic Safety Admin., 489 F.3d 1279, 1295 (D.C. Cir. 2007). Donation-based financing of government can thus ‘circumvent or skew the normal processes of democratic decision-making.’:
Public Citizen has published a series of reports about the many corruption and abuse of power concerns surrounding the White House Ballroom Project:
- Ballroom Billions documented more than $50 billion in government contracts that flowed to corporations after they donated to the Ballroom Project.
- Banquet of Greed exposed a myriad of conflicts of interest concerns about pay-to-play government contracts and dropped enforcement actions benefiting ballroom donors.
- Ballroom Lobby-Blitz found that two-thirds of the corporations funding the ballroom project are clients of the firms of three powerful lobbyists’ who have raised funds for the ballroom: Brian Ballard, Jeff Miller, and Reince Priebus.
- Trump’s Three Ballroom Stooges highlights how White House officials James Blair, William Scharf and Stuart Levenbach are not legally qualified to sit on the National Capital Planning Commission and should recuse themselves from the vote on Trump’s Ballroom Project and resign from the commission.