Two Democrat-appointed judges just handed President Donald Trump one of the worst judicial setbacks of his second term.
This ruling came out of left field.
And Trump fired back immediately, vowing to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
What the Court Actually Did
A panel of judges from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the modified preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Richard Leon in a 2-1 decision that drew an immediate and furious response from the White House.
Obama-appointed Judge Patricia A Millett and Biden-appointed Judge Bradley N Garcia ruled as part of the three-judge panel that Trump must get Congressional approval for the ballroom.
The majority’s reasoning was blunt. The appeals court found that the “Constitution assigns Congress — not the Executive — the responsibility to decide whether proposed changes to the physical design of the White House may proceed, even where those changes are said to serve security interests,” adding that “each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence.”
The court also wrote that “the National Trust has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House — the People’s House — to fit a particular President’s desires.”
But the ruling is not a final stop sign. The court stayed its own ruling for 14 days to allow the Trump administration to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. And underground work tied to military and security infrastructure can continue in the meantime.
The majority signed off on Leon’s order halting the ballroom construction while allowing building to continue on “below-ground construction, including construction of bunkers, bomb-shelters, and military and medical infrastructure, as well as above-ground construction ‘strictly necessary to cover, secure, and protect’ such facilities.”
The Dissent That Trump Highlighted
Not every judge on that panel agreed with the majority’s conclusion. Trump appointee Judge Neomi Rao pushed back hard.
Rao said in her dissent that the trial judge’s injunction blocking the project “is beyond the proper province of the federal courts” and that construction should be allowed to continue, writing that “the district court seized supervision of construction at the White House, and my colleagues affirm this judicial overreach.”
Rao called the lower court’s order to halt construction “a blatant abuse of discretion” and argued that the National Trust for Historic Preservation had no standing to stop construction of the new East Wing in the first place.
Rao wrote that “the district court elevated the aesthetic displeasure of a single passerby over the government’s security interests in the ballroom and the security risks of leaving an open construction site at the President’s home and office.”
Trump quoted her dissent at length in his Truth Social post and praised what he called her “strongly worded” rebuke of the majority’s reasoning.
Trump’s Response and the National Security Argument
Trump did not wait long to respond. He wrote on Truth Social that “the decision has been stayed, and does not take effect for a period of time” and that “we will be immediately appealing to the United States Supreme Court.”
Trump posted that “the Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents.”
Trump listed the features of the project in his post, describing “Bomb Shelters, State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Facilities, Structures and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass.”
Trump wrote that “this unjust decision must be overturned by the Supreme Court in its entirety.”
The President also took direct aim at the two judges in the majority, posting that “two Obama and Biden Appellate Court Judges just voted against the desperately needed Military Center, required for the National Security of Washington, D.C., and our Country, itself.”
Trump added that “the Circuit Court also refused to acknowledge that the desperately needed, and totally secure Ballroom, which is being built ahead of schedule and under budget, is a Gift from President Trump and Great Patriots of the United States of America.”
And the private funding angle matters here. Trump relied on private donations to begin the project without seeking an appropriation from Congress, touting the arrangement as a boon to taxpayers. But the courts found that private financing did not allow him to bypass the separate requirement that Congress authorize major changes to the White House grounds.
The Trump administration had also requested $1 billion for the ballroom, which Congress refused earlier this year.
What This Fight Is Really About
Strip away the architectural arguments and the historic preservation language, and what you have is a question about presidential authority that the Supreme Court will now almost certainly have to answer.
The project is not simply a ballroom. Trump described a drone base on the roof and a military hospital as part of a six-story subterranean complex. The president himself told reporters that “the ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under.” That framing matters. If the underground military infrastructure is the real purpose of the project, then the question of whether a historic preservation group has standing to block it looks very different from the outside.
Trump’s planned military complex would replace the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a secure underground bunker dating back to World War II that has long been an open secret in Washington. Blocking the aboveground work while permitting the underground work to continue creates an odd situation where the courts are essentially supervising construction in real time at the President’s own home and office.
That is precisely the point Rao hammered in her dissent, and it is the argument that could carry weight with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Whether six justices agree that federal courts have no business micromanaging construction at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a question that may get answered before the midterms.
The pattern of activist judges using injunctions to halt Trump’s agenda is not new. What is new is the venue. The White House itself is now a construction site caught in a legal standoff between an executive who says the project is a military necessity and two Democrat-appointed judges who say it is a renovation project that needs a permission slip from Capitol Hill.
The same political class that spent years demanding Trump be held accountable to institutional norms is now cheering on a ruling that tells the President of the United States he cannot upgrade the security infrastructure of his own residence without a congressional vote. The irony is hard to miss. Congress has not exactly distinguished itself lately as a model of decisive, security-minded governance.
The Supreme Court will now decide whether the DC Circuit got it right. Given the current composition of the Court and the genuine national security arguments the administration is making, the outcome is far from certain. But one thing is clear: this fight is not over, and Trump has no intention of letting two Obama-Biden judges have the last word on what gets built at the White House.
Trump has said he hopes to hold events in the ballroom before he is scheduled to leave office in January 2029. Whether that happens now depends on nine justices in Washington, DC.
Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, NBC News, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, The Spokesman-Review, Washington Examiner, Bloomberg Law, The Hill, Raw Story, Military Times, Time