The administration of US President Donald Trump has renewed its push to lift a court ruling barring progress on a new White House ballroom, once again citing gun violence as a reason for pursuing the construction.
In a court filing submitted on Sunday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche argued it was “urgent” that the ballroom be completed.
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“This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!” Blanche wrote, denouncing the lawsuit that has paused construction.
As justification, Blanche pointed to the events of last Saturday, when a 21-year-old suspect named Nasire Best approached a White House security checkpoint in Washington, DC, pulled out a gun, and started shooting.
One bystander was injured. The suspect was killed after an exchange of gunfire with Secret Service agents. The sound could be heard across the White House lawn, where reporters were seen running for safety.
Blanche argued that the incident represented the second time in the span of a month that Trump’s life had been threatened.
On April 25, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen had attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Trump and his top officials were in attendance. After an exchange of gunfire with security, Allen was taken into custody.
“This second attack on the President this month underscores the critical need for top level, state of the art security at the White House, including the Ballroom,” Blanche wrote in the filing.
He added that the ballroom “is being constructed to ensure that the President can perform his constitutional duties in a safe and heavily secured facility”.
The Department of Justice, under Blanche, advanced a similar argument after the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
And Trump himself made a nearly identical statement on Saturday, using his Truth Social platform to link the recent shooting to the ballroom.
“This event is one month removed from the White House Correspondent’Dinner shooting [sic], and goes to show how important it is, for all future Presidents, to get, what will be, the most safe and secure space of its kind ever built in Washington, D.C,” Trump wrote.
“The National Security of our Country demands it!”
Barriers to building
But Trump is facing an increasingly uphill battle as he pursues his ballroom project.
On March 31, a federal judge, Richard Leon, issued a temporary injunction against further construction on the ballroom.
While Leon did offer a carve-out for any work “necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House”, the judge did say that “bald assertions of ‘national security’” would not be accepted as a means of bypassing his decision or the law.
He called on the Trump administration to petition Congress for approval for the project. Until then, Leon ruled, “construction has to stop”.
In recent weeks, Trump has sought additional funding from Congress for the ballroom, though not approval for the construction itself.
But even members of his party have baulked at the price tag. Trump demanded that $1bn for the ballroom project be added to a bill for immigration enforcement funding, but last week, Republicans in the Senate agreed to drop the provision.
Some objected to the expense. Others pointed out that, with the $1bn in unrelated spending, the immigration-related funding bill would no longer qualify for a process called budget reconciliation, which allows bills to pass through the Senate with a simple majority.
Growing ballroom costs
Trump had previously maintained that the ballroom would be funded entirely through private donations.
But the associated costs have ballooned. Last year, Trump estimated the construction would cost $200m. Then, in December, he increased the anticipated price to $400m.
Over the last month, however, the total has now leapt to include the $1bn in taxpayer funds, which are reportedly intended for security improvements.
Still, as Trump gave reporters a tour of the construction site on May 19, he insisted that the costs of the ballroom project would come out of private pockets.
“All of this was paid for by myself. We are making a gift of this. This is a gift. This is not going to be paid for by the taxpayers,” Trump said, gesturing to the site.
He has repeatedly claimed the construction project is ahead of schedule and under budget, an assertion Blanche repeated in Sunday’s court filing.
But on May 12, when confronted by reporters about the mushrooming price tag, Trump appeared defensive.
“I doubled the size of it, you dumb person. Doubled the size. You are not a smart person,” he told one journalist.
New details emerging
The project has also been criticised for its lack of transparency and its failure to get outside approvals.
Even this month, new details were still emerging about the structure, which is slated to be about 90,000 square feet (about 8,360 square metres), dwarfing the White House’s executive mansion.
Trump has also recently revealed that the new ballroom complex will include six floors of subterranean facilities, including a military hospital. Its completion is slated for September 2028, shortly before Trump’s term expires in January 2029.
Some of the newly proposed features were detailed in Blanche’s recent court filing.
The ballroom, Blanche wrote, “includes bomb shelters, a state of the art hospital and medical facilities, Top Secret military installations, structures, and equipment, protective partitioning, and other features”.
In addition, the “heavily secured” roof is slated to contain “a major drone port and Government sniper facilities”.
Blanche argued in Sunday’s filing that he was forced to reveal those security features in order to petition for the court injunction to be lifted.
“The longer this frivolous litigation persists, the more our National Security will be jeopardized as the Government continues to be forced to justify — through the divulgence of such security installations, layout, and other specifications of construction — the necessity for a secure addition to the White House,” Blanche wrote.
The plaintiffs have argued that the Trump administration has largely acted without any oversight.
In December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed its complaint, alleging that the law mandates approval not only from Congress but also from the National Capital Planning Commission.
In addition, it argued that “no adequate public environmental assessment” had been carried out before the Trump administration abruptly demolished the White House’s East Wing in October to make way for the large-scale construction.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever— not President Trump, not President Biden, and not anyone else. And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in,” the lawsuit says.
“President Trump’s efforts to do so should be immediately halted.”
