The White House is moving to install Trump-aligned appointees to a commission charged by Congress with reviewing Washington’s public art and national memorials, seeking members likely to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s controversial ballroom and other projects.
The White House is expected to invite past Trump appointees to rejoin the Commission of Fine Arts, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss those plans. Trump officials have described the move as returning former members to uncompleted four-year terms that were cut short by the Biden administration, the people said.
It is not yet clear if those former members — architectural critic Justin Shubow, developer and designer Rodney Mims Cook Jr., sculptor and painter Chas Fagan, landscape architect Perry Guillot and architect Steven Spandle — would accept the invitation. Shubow, Cook and Guillot declined to comment. Fagan and Spandle did not respond to requests for comment.
White House officials have also considered appointing Trump loyalists with little formal arts expertise, according to one of the people and another who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The commission faces intensifying scrutiny over the president’s building agenda, which includes a proposed 90,000-square-foot ballroom addition to the White House that is now the subject of a legal challenge.
Beyond the ballroom, the commission is expected to review future projects that would shape Washington’s landscape, including a planned triumphal arch.
The White House declined to identify who would be appointed to the commission, with officials saying that selections would come soon.
“Any personnel announcements will come directly from President Trump,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
A quorum for the next meeting, scheduled for Jan. 15, would require four commissioners.
Trump officials in December court filings acknowledged efforts to reconstitute the commission but did not offer any details about the potential members or a timeline. The White House fired all six Biden holdovers on the panel in October.
A federal judge in December instructed the White House to submit its ballroom plans to the Commission on Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission for review in response to a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which seeks to ensure a public process. That judge on Wednesday granted the Trump administration a one-week extension.
The National Capital Planning Commission, another federal review panel with oversight of construction projects in Washington, is scheduled to host a White House presentation on the ballroom next week. That commission is now led by Trump’s staff secretary and includes other loyalists installed this summer.
Established in 1910, the Commission of Fine Arts has occasionally been a nuisance for past presidents, taking years to review projects and sometimes pushing back on the White House’s wishes. The panel’s then-chairman resisted President Harry S. Truman’s plans to build a balcony in the late 1940s, prompting Truman to later replace him and other members of the panel.
The Biden administration forced out four Trump-appointed members of the Commission of Fine Arts in 2021, with White House officials at the time saying they wanted more “diversity of background and experience” and a different mix of aesthetic expertise. All four members forced out were White men. Cook, also a White man, was pushed out by the Biden administration the following year.
Several of the Trump appointees had worked closely with White House officials. Shubow, the commission’s chairman, had advised the Trump administration on its architectural strategy. Guillot had worked with the Trump White House to redesign the Rose Garden, and Spandle had worked with the administration to design the tennis pavilion.
Tevi Troy, a White House historian, criticized the Biden and Trump administrations for firing members of the review panels rather than letting them serve out their terms, saying that it risked creating partisan divisions.
“There is a long-standing interest in the federal government monitoring and managing the architecture and the look of the federal city,” said Troy, who served in the George W. Bush administration as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. “A commission of experts who represent different perspectives, and go from administration to administration, is a way to help shape this without having too heavy a thumb on the scale.”
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