Washington, D.C. — Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire joined fellow lawmakers in filing a legal brief Thursday in federal court to stop President Trump’s unlawful demolition and reconstruction of the White House East Wing and his proposal to build a massive ballroom in its place — a project with an estimated price tag of up to $400 million.
“The White House belongs to the American people — no President gets to bulldoze it on a whim,” said Congresswoman Goodlander. “The Constitution is clear: it takes an act of Congress to tear down a federal building. This President skipped that step entirely — and he’s asking us to believe he can spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a personal vanity project that Congress never authorized and never funded. I will use every tool available, including the courts, to defend our Constitution and our system of checks and balances.”
The lawmakers filed the legal brief in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Oral arguments are scheduled for June 5 following the district court’s preliminary injunction blocking the project.
The brief, signed by dozens of Members of Congress, lays out the constitutional case in stark terms. The Constitution clearly establishes “Congress’s primacy over federal property, spending, and the District of Columbia” — and therefore over any decision to demolish or reconstruct the White House. The brief notes that the White House “was built only after Congress passed legislation authorizing its construction and appropriating funds to cover that expense” and has been maintained that way for more than two centuries.
“Appellants have no authority to demolish the White House’s East Wing and to build a massive ballroom in its stead,” the brief reads. Congress, the lawmakers argue, “neither authorized nor appropriated funds for the President to demolish the East Wing” — and the statutes the administration cites to defend its actions cover only “maintenance and upkeep of extant White House property,” not the demolition of an entire wing.
The brief also exposes a glaring fiscal reality: the entire amount Congress actually appropriated for White House maintenance — even if devoted solely to this project — would cover less than one percent of the ballroom’s estimated $400 million cost. As the brief puts it, “Maintaining a building is flatly incompatible with demolishing it.”
The brief squarely rejects the Trump administration’s argument that Congress can only intervene after the fact if a White House renovation “goes too far.” That approach, the lawmakers write, is “precisely backward”: the constitutional default is not unlimited executive authority. As the Supreme Court established in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the President’s power is at its “lowest ebb” when he acts against the will of Congress.
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