A federal arts commission on Thursday voted to approve President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, even as a federal judge considers whether to halt the project — and outside architects and watchdog groups say it’s too large.
The Commission of Fine Arts — which Trump has packed with allies, including his 26-year-old executive assistant — voted unanimously to approve the design of the nearly 90,000-square-foot building, which would be the most significant change to the White House complex in decades.
“This is a facility that is desperately needed for over 150 years, and it’s beautiful,” Commission Chair Rodney Mims Cook Jr. said.
Thursday’s vote was the first concrete checkpoint in the Trump administration’s nine-week push to get the president’s ballroom building approved by two committees charged by Congress with reviewing designs of federal construction projects. Having secured the fine arts commission’s blessing, the president’s team will turn its attention to the second of those committees — the National Capital Planning Commission — with a goal of winning its approval in the first week of March and starting aboveground construction on the ballroom as early as April.
Shalom Baranes, the lead architect on the project, also presented his latest concepts to the commission on Thursday, which included reworking a White House driveway to accommodate the large ballroom.
While the commissions have historically served as a check on the government’s building projects — some of which prompted months or years of panel deliberations — Thursday’s vote represents the latest example of Trump bending federal processes as he seeks to rush his ballroom project from design to completion.
The president rapidly tore down the White House’s East Wing annex last year without seeking approval from Congress or review panels. His plan to build a new ballroom building that would match the “height and scale” of the main White House building has largely ignored concerns from U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, architecture experts and preservationists that it will be too big and spoil the centuries-old symbol of American power and democracy.
Following suit, Trump’s new appointees altered the fine arts commission’s processes to conform to the president’s desire to fast-track the project. Cook skipped the traditional two-step review process: The commission starts by green-lighting a project’s conceptual design and then approves its final design at a later meeting after architects incorporate commissioners’ feedback and flesh out their plans.
The first stage was on the agenda at Thursday’s meeting, but after the commission approved Baranes’s design concept, Cook made a second motion to give the plans final approval, which also passed.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit charged by Congress with preserving historic buildings, criticized the commission’s unexpectedly truncated process, including the decision to approve final plans that were not presented or reviewed.
The commission “bypassed its obligation to provide serious design review and consider the views of the American people,” the National Trust, which is suing the Trump administration to stop ballroom construction, said in a statement.
Trump has framed the ballroom as a top priority, repeatedly extolling the design in public remarks and saying that presidents need a permanent space to entertain VIP guests. He has also defended the cost of the planned $400 million project, saying that it is being funded by private donations.
“Will be the Greatest Ballroom ever built” Trump wrote Wednesday in a social media post that included an architectural depiction of a towering neoclassical structure adorned with Corinthian columns and an imposing pediment — the triangular structure above the portico — whose apex, according to Trump, matches the main mansion’s North Portico. The rendering was prepared by Shalom Baranes Associates, the firm handling the project.
Democrats and watchdog groups have questioned whether ballroom contributors, including major corporations such as Amazon, Google and Palantir that collectively have billions of dollars in contracts before the administration, will receive special access or other perks in exchange for their gifts. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Some Democrats have acknowledged the potential value of renovating the White House grounds but said the ballroom should be far smaller and go through congressional review, to ensure transparency.
Polls have found that most Americans oppose the president’s planned ballroom. Twenty-five percent of respondents said they supported tearing down the East Wing to build the ballroom, compared with 58 percent who opposed the project, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month.
The White House recently remade both commissions reviewing the ballroom project, including the Commission of Fine Arts, a 116-year-old panel that Congress intended to include “well-qualified judges of the fine arts.”
Three of the seven arts commissioners on the panel are current political appointees in the Trump administration. A fourth, Pamela Patenaude, served as deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development during Trump’s first administration. A fifth, architect James McCrery II, helped design the ballroom and recused himself from voting on the project Thursday.
Commissioners universally praised the ballroom project, alternately lauding it for meshing with the Treasury building next door, adding beautiful landscaping to the White House grounds, and providing a safer, more stately venue for entertaining world leaders and other VIP guests. Trump has long disparaged the tents past presidents have erected on the South Lawn to accommodate large-scale events, an argument Cook adopted Thursday.
“Our sitting president has actually designed a very beautiful structure,” he told his fellow commissioners, adding: “The United States just should not be entertaining the world in tents, and it is really outrageous that we do that — and no president has really stepped up to the plate.”
The commissioners represented a small minority of the views represented at the meeting. More than 2,000 people wrote to the agency in the week leading up to Thursday’s vote, with more than 99 percent of them expressing opposition to the project, the commission’s staff secretary, Thomas Luebke, told commissioners. Their concerns centered around a rushed approval process, lack of public input and the proposed building’s size and design overshadowing the main White House, he added.
Luebke read part of one comment as an exemplar: “This ill-conceived addition, which has already led to the hasty demolition of the historic East Wing, represents an affront to our heritage, a circumvention of democratic processes and a misallocation of resources that could better serve the Republic,” Luebke said.
Commissioners were undeterred, including newly sworn-in Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s executive assistant who works just outside the Oval Office. She responded to concerns over the size by saying the ballroom’s planned 1,000-person seating capacity “isn’t that big by ballroom standards.”
“This is sort of like the greatest country in the world. It’s the greatest house in the world, and we want it to be sort of the greatest ballroom in the world,” she said.
The other federal panel reviewing the ballroom, the National Capital Planning Commission, is led by Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary whom Trump appointed in July to lead the body. It includes a pair of other White House officials, James Blair and Stuart Levenbach, as well as nine seats apportioned to sitting Cabinet secretaries and other officials who have a role in overseeing Washington.
Leon, who has questioned whether Trump has the authority to build the ballroom, has said that he may issue an order on its construction this month.
The post Commission, packed with Trump allies, approves White House ballroom project appeared first on Washington Post.
