Construction on the White House ballroom and bunker complex can keep moving for now, after an appeals court again allowed the work to continue on April 18 while it considers whether Judge Richard J. Leon was right to say the project was unlawful from the start.
The timing matters because the case is now headed toward arguments in June, and the crews are still working on a 90,000-square-foot project built in place of the demolished East Wing. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued on Dec. 12 to stop it, but the project has advanced through the winter and spring as the courts have repeatedly let the work proceed while the legal fight runs in parallel.
Leon, who sits on the Federal District Court in Washington, had already given the White House time to seek approval from two review panels before he stepped in more forcefully. The Commission of Fine Arts approved the project in February, and the second review panel approved it two months later. Even then, he declined to intervene again on Feb. 26, before saying on March 31 that no statute came close to giving the president the authority he claimed to have and ordering construction halted after two weeks.
That ruling should have frozen the project, but it did not. Hours later, the Trump administration appealed, and on April 11 the appeals court sent the case back to Leon to clarify whether the military complex beneath was covered by his order. He answered on April 16 that the underground complex was not subject to the halt, a distinction that left the aboveground ballroom fight separate from the bunker work below.
The legal split matters because it narrows what the court is being asked to stop. Mr. Trump began describing the ballroom at the end of March as a superstructure sitting on top of a new underground bunker, which made the boundary between the two pieces of work a central issue in the appeal. The National Trust also pressed arguments that the project relied on private funding and lacked input from Congress, while Leon rejected what he called a ragtag group of theories in siding against the project.
For now, the practical result is simple: the ballroom work continues, and the court fight does not. The question in June is whether the appeals court will uphold Leon’s ruling that the project was unlawful from the beginning, or leave the construction moving ahead under the same legal cloud that has hovered over it since December.
