Chutkan finds no statute authorizes the arch, rejecting the 1925 law argument
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday night temporarily blocked construction of the 250-foot arch President Trump plans to build near Arlington National Cemetery, issuing a restraining order that bars the administration from taking any steps to start work for the next two weeks.
The order gives Chutkan more time to consider whether to halt the project for the duration of the litigation over it. It arrived shortly after the National Capital Planning Commission, made up mostly of Trump appointees, approved plans for the arch. The government had wanted to begin construction immediately after the commission’s approval.
Two lawsuits prompted the order. Three veterans and an architectural historian sued the administration over the project in February, arguing the president lacks authority to proceed without Congress’s approval, which federal law requires when building structures or new monuments on federal public land in the nation’s capital. The District of Columbia and Virginia filed a separate suit last weekend seeking to stop construction. Chutkan combined the cases and granted an initial halt, finding the two governments “likely to succeed” in arguing the project requires congressional approval — which she called a strong indicator that a restraining order “would serve the public interest.”
Washington and Virginia, where Arlington National Cemetery is located, call the project “flagrantly unlawful” under the law governing commemorative works in the District of Columbia, which requires specific congressional authorization for new monuments built on federal land. Chutkan said Congress has enacted no statute authorizing the arch, and she rejected the government’s claim that a 1925 law supplied the needed authority. That statute authorized construction of the Arlington Memorial Bridge across the Potomac River, a design that was to include two columns on the parkland at its west end — where the arch is now planned — though the columns were never built. Government lawyers had argued the 1925 authorization did not “mandate rigid adherence to that design.”
“The sheer improbability that a 100-year-old statute would contain authority, unknown to every previous administration, to erect a 250-foot arch at a principal location in the Nation’s capital indicates how far Defendants must stretch to justify this project,” she said.
The arch is one of a handful of construction projects Trump has made a focus of his second term in Washington. Almost all of those undertakings have drawn legal challenges, and opponents say the administration has been pushing construction forward in an effort to outrun judicial review. In the arch case, the challengers aimed to accomplish what opponents of Trump’s White House ballroom and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation could not: stopping work before it began.
Officially named the Triumphal Arch, the structure is intended to honor the nation’s 250th anniversary, according to the National Park Service. It is designed with gold statues on top and is expected to be twice as large as the Lincoln Memorial. Construction is expected to take about three years and includes six stairways, five elevators and an observation deck for visitors.
The Justice Department argues construction is permissible under federal law and that the arch serves an important national security purpose. Its lawyers pointed to a law giving the National Park Service authority over national parkland. In court filings, the government said the structure’s height and location — about a mile from the Pentagon — will aid ongoing efforts to defend the region against evolving threats, including those posed by small, unmanned aircraft systems. Trump has said the arch would also serve as a military complex with snipers, drones and a stockpile of ammunition.
The national-security rationale surfaced late in the case. During a hearing last week, Chutkan appeared frustrated that the government was proffering it only then, and alarmed that its lawyers could not give her details about the president’s plan to store ammunition and drones at a site she said is supposed to draw 2,000 to 22,000 civilian visitors a day.
Similar arguments helped the administration once before. Claims that Trump needs a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to keep him safe from an attack on the White House helped persuade the Supreme Court over the summer to allow that project to continue without Congress’s approval. But Chutkan cautioned last week that the ballroom’s national-security justifications would not be “talismanic” for the arch. In Thursday night’s ruling, she said the government’s “belated and unsupported assertion that the Arch will yield national security benefits” did not alter her analysis.