An arts commission stacked with President Trump’s allies approved his $400 million ballroom on Thursday, bypassing the normal review process and fast-tracking the vote on a project that would transform the profile of the White House.
The vote came even as the panel’s longtime secretary — one of the only people involved who was not appointed by Mr. Trump — described mass opposition to the project, saying he had received more than 2,000 messages from across the country in one week.
The Commission of Fine Arts had been expected to hold only a preliminary vote on Thursday, but the panel chose to push forward and give its final approval ahead of schedule. Mr. Trump wants to have the ballroom built and open to guests within a year and a half.
“This is a facility that is desperately needed for over 150 years, and it’s beautiful,” said the panel’s chairman, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., whom Mr. Trump appointed to the board this year.
The ballroom still needs approval by the National Capital Planning Commission — which the president has also filled with allies — and a federal judge is considering whether to stop the project. But the vote on Thursday cleared at least one logistical hurdle for the ballroom.
Thomas Luebke, the panel’s secretary, who has been in the job for decades, suggested a rushed vote would be highly unusual and tried to slow down the vote, to no avail.
“The normal processes — you would wait for it to come forward with the documentation associated with that,” Mr. Luebke said. “The normal circumstance would be that you would see it when it was ready.”
Mr. Luebke also said he was struck by the outpouring of opposition to the project that the commission received.
“In more than two decades of casework here for me, I’ve never seen as much public engagement on this,” he said. “We literally have gotten, just in the past week or so, more than 2,000 various messages.”
He added: “The summary of it was overwhelmingly in opposition — over 99 percent — to this project, citizens across the entire spectrum, all professional expertise levels. The general comments were that they were concerned about the illegal demolition without permits or oversight, inappropriate scale that will dwarf the White House, the violation of historic preservation principles, a lack of transparency in funding and contracting and a fundamental miscarriage of democratic principles.”
The vote was the latest example of Mr. Trump’s elimination of any pocket of resistance from within his administration to his plans for a 90,000-square foot ballroom, filling the boards and commissions meant to oversee the project with people who work for him. Some of them have no notable background in the arts.
Mr. Trump’s latest appointee to the Commission of Fine Arts, for instance, is his former receptionist, the 26-year-old Chamberlain Harris, who now works as the deputy director of Oval Office operations at the White House.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, objected to the new makeup of the panel this week. The foundation pointed out that the Commission of Fine Arts was supposed to include “experts in relevant disciplines, including art, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design.”
But there are no landscape architects on the panel, which the cultural landscape organization says is a “monumental deficit since the commissioners will be making decisions about one of the nation’s most important and visible designed landscapes.”
The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s picks and maintained that they were more aligned with the president’s America First agenda.
“President Trump has an incredible eye and appreciation for the arts and only selects the most talented people possible,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman. “These individuals possess a wealth of experience that reflects the values of everyday Americans and President Trump’s vision to make America great again.”
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he planned to have the ballroom built and open to guests within a year and a half.
In October, Mr. Trump abruptly tore down one side of the White House, demolishing the entire East Wing, which contained the historical offices of the first lady.
The administration has been under legal pressure from historical preservationists to submit the new ballroom project to a formal review process. So far, the initial construction on the project has been allowed to proceed, though a judge recently expressed deep skepticism about the government’s case.
Mr. Trump is not the first president to remake the Commission of Fine Arts and appoint members more to his liking. President Harry S. Truman did the same thing after the panel opposed his proposal to add a balcony to the White House in the 1940s.
Here’s how the president is pushing through his project by remaking the panels that oversee construction in Washington:
Replacing the Architect
Mr. Trump has faced much criticism that his plans for a White House ballroom are too large and that the building will dwarf the Executive Mansion and the West Wing.
The president’s first architect on the ballroom project, James C. McCrery II, presented him with several smaller approaches. But Mr. Trump kept pushing for a bigger project. The men disagreed over the ballooning size of the ballroom, and eventually Mr. McCrery agreed to take a step back as the main architect on the project.
He was replaced by Shalom Baranes, whose firm has been designing government buildings for decades and has collected awards for its commitment to historic preservation.
Mr. Baranes did make one change to his drawings in response to feedback from the fine arts panel: He redesigned a planned portico on the building to make it less prominent.
Remaking the Commission of Fine Arts
Mr. Trump fired the entire board of the Commission of Fine Arts last year and began appointing replacements this year.
Among those appointed was Mr. McCrery, who has recused himself from discussing or voting on the project. Others include Ms. Harris, who works for Mr. Trump as the deputy director of Oval Office operations; Pamela Hughes Patenaude, who previously worked for Mr. Trump as the deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and Mary Anne Carter, an ally of the White House chief of staff who serves as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The new chairman of the panel, Mr. Cook, has made clear that he views his job as ensuring that the president’s project can go forward.
“Our president has a very ambitious plan for the District of Columbia, as well as the world,” Mr. Cook said at the commission’s meeting last month. “So we need to let the president do his job and, as best we can, keep his mind off of things like this, that we can keep him rolling, and do it as elegantly and beautifully as the American people deserve for generations and further centuries into the future.”
Mr. Trump praised the board’s action on social media on Thursday. “The Commission of Fine Arts just approved, unanimously, 6 to 0, with one recusal because he had a conflict in that he worked professionally on the job, the White House Ballroom,” he wrote. “Great accolades were paid to the building’s beauty and scale. Thank you to the members of the Commission!”
Remaking the National Capital Planning Commission
Mr. Trump has also assumed control of the leadership of the National Capital Planning Commission, though that panel also has representation from the D.C. government.
The commission must approve Mr. Trump’s plans before he can begin construction.
He has installed his former personal lawyer Will Scharf as the chairman of this panel. Mr. Scharf currently serves as assistant to the president and the White House staff secretary.
He is known for presenting Mr. Trump with executive orders to sign in the Oval Office.
Mr. Scharf made no objection when Mr. Trump abruptly tore down the East Wing to make way for the ballroom project. He maintained that his panel had no control over demolition, only new construction.
The National Capital Planning Commission has also put the ballroom project on a fast track for final approval at its meeting next month.
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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