A federal judge turned to a Dr. Seuss classic as she slammed the brakes on a Trump administration project in Washington.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday granted an emergency temporary restraining order barring the National Park Service from cutting down any more trees at East Potomac Golf Course. Quoting the plaintiffs’ warning that “destroyed trees cannot be replaced,” Reyes added in a footnote, “Just ask the Lorax.”
Reyes had previously invoked the orange-haired, tree-loving Lorax during a September hearing for the same lawsuit to stop the Trump administration’s plans for the golf course, saying, “I am not the Lorax, I do not speak for the trees.”
Her emergency order issued on Tuesday, which runs through October 26, halts a project the Interior Department pushed through in a single week. Officials ordered, considered and approved a plan between October 5 and October 9 to clear hundreds of trees from the course, and bulldozers arrived the next morning. By day’s end, crews had removed about 430 “healthy, non-invasive trees,” the judge wrote.
“Breakneck speed to clear trees that posed no harm,” Reyes wrote. “The reason? Disputed. The budget? Unclear. The environmental impact? Unstudied. The urgency? None.”
The DC Preservation League and two regular golfers sued in February over the Trump administration’s plans to remake the public golf course. In June, Trump posted on Truth Social that work on a new course would begin September 1 and promised “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”
The government argued the tree plan carries out a 2019 landscape report and has nothing to do with Trump’s vision. Reyes wasn’t buying it.
“It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course,” she wrote. “That asks rather a lot of coincidence.”
The judge concluded officials “raced to undertake” the tree plan “because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old” report.
Reyes noted she had repeatedly given the government “the benefit of the doubt,” accepting assurances in September that it was only removing trees that were “hazardous, dead, dying, or invasive.” “The Government then did precisely what Plaintiffs feared,” she wrote.
The Trump administration didn’t notify the plaintiffs or the court until just before 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9. Crews started clearing trees around 8 a.m. the next day.
In her Lorax footnote, Reyes recounted how Dr. Seuss spent a year struggling to draw the character before writing the entire book in one afternoon after spotting a herd of elephants on vacation in Africa. “The Court has seen no elephants,” she wrote. “And it has certainly had less than a year to write.”
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