Appeals court again allows Trump ballroom construction to go on, for now

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday allowed construction on President Donald Trump’s ballroom project to proceed through early June, pausing, for now, a lower court’s order that construction stop after next week.

The overnight decision was procedural: An administrative stay gave the court around seven weeks to consider the case more fully. But it was the latest in a series of careful extensions by courts that have each allowed the president to keep building for short stretches as a lawsuit fighting the project proceeds.

Last weekend, the same three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had avoided wading into the case right away. It sent the case back to Judge Richard J. Leon, a U.S. District Court judge, to clarify the contours of the case after Trump complained publicly for weeks that the project includes transformative national security upgrades to the White House.

The appeals panel set arguments for June 5, to consider whether to block construction anew. Because of the intermittent extensions, the president has yet to run into a deadline or temporarily bring construction to a halt.

When Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House in October, discussion centered on the soaring 90,000-square-foot ballroom he had proposed building in its place. But after Leon questioned the legality of the project, the president quickly pivoted, framing the ballroom as little more than a “shed” for a far more ambitious underground military compound, secretly designed to replace the former Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

Last weekend, judges on the same panel wrote they would not second-guess the president’s claims that halting construction could jeopardize a critical security modernization.

On Thursday, however, Leon explained that his thinking about the project had not changed.

Unless Congress authorized Trump to fundamentally alter the historic White House grounds, he wrote, the new ballroom structure replacing the East Wing could not be built.

Leon reasoned that the Trump administration could continue in good faith making necessary security upgrades that the public would never see. But he warned that “national security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” and held firm that Trump could not use those upgrades as a pretext to rebuild the White House however he wished.