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A US judge has halted the construction of Donald Trump’s $400m White House ballroom.
The US president demolished the historic East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the project.
The US district judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a request for a preliminary injunction by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization which brought a lawsuit alleging that Trump had exceeded his authority by razing the East Wing and beginning construction without approval from Congress.
The decision by Leon, an appointee of the Republican president George W Bush, leaves the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom project on hold unless it receives approval from Congress.
“Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” Leon wrote in his opinion on Tuesday. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”
In a statement on his Truth Social platform shortly after the ruling, Trump attacked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which he called “a radical left group of lunatics”. The ballroom is “under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World”, the president claimed.
The order to halt construction will take effect in 14 days, giving the White House time to appeal.
“The President may at any time go to Congress to obtain express authority to construct a ballroom and to do so with private funds,” Leon wrote in his opinion. “Indeed, Congress may even choose to appropriate funds for the ballroom, or at least decide that some other funding scheme is acceptable. Either way, Congress will thereby retain its authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the Government’s spending.
“The National Trust’s interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated,” he added. “And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles. Not a bad outcome, that!”
The decision comes after months of litigation around the project. Earlier this month, Leon had signaled his skepticism about the administration’s argument that the ballroom was an allowed “alteration” to White House grounds.
“I’m struggling to see this as an ‘alteration’,” Leon said in mid-March.
White House lawyers have argued that the president did not need congressional approval for the project.
In February, Leon declined an earlier request from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to halt construction of the ballroom, on procedural grounds, but he said he would consider an amended complaint, which the group filed shortly after.
The most recently reported cost estimate for the ballroom stands at $400m. It has previously been reported that the project is being financed by private donors and large corporations including Meta, Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, Google and Comcast.
