.png)
1 hour ago
4
The Trump administration can continue building a $400m White House ballroom at the site of the former East Wing, a US appeals court ruled on Friday.
The three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for Washington DC granted the administration a stay of an order days earlier that had aimed to halt most aboveground construction. That earlier order had resulted from a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which challenged whether Donald Trump had the authority to raze the East Wing and construct the ballroom without congressional approval.
The US district judge Richard Leon had initially halted construction of the ballroom in March – because of that lack of congressional approval – before an appeals court ordered him to reconsider the national security implications of the pause.
The Trump administration had argued that suspending construction of the new facility is “threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the president and his family, and the president’s staff”.
In response, Leon ordered that the administration could continue below-ground construction, including that of national security facilities – “provided that any such construction will not lock in the above-ground size and scale of the ballroom”.
The appeals court said it granted an administrative stay on Friday to Leon’s follow-up order to give “the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal”.
That “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion”, the order stated.
The next hearing in the case was tentatively scheduled for 5 June.
Trump has maintained that the ballroom project is being financed by private donors and large corporations – among them Meta, Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Google and Comcast.
It is one prong of a broader push by the president to leave a physical imprint on the nation’s capital. Other parts of that push include plans for a 250ft (76 meter) arch and a multiyear renovation of the Kennedy Center performing arts complex.
