Roughly 150 Democratic lawmakers filed a legal brief on Thursday in the White House East Wing litigation, pressing the argument that President Trump cannot keep building until he gets explicit approval from Congress. The filing says the administration has no right to demolish structures or erect new ones on White House grounds without clear authorization and money from lawmakers.
The coalition is led by California Reps. Robert Garcia and Jared Huffman, along with Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, and it adds a new political front to a case already moving through the courts. The lawmakers say the president cannot undertake any construction at the White House, “much less demolish one of its wings,” without congressional authorization and an appropriation. They also argue that “the Constitution grants Congress exclusive control over all federal property.”
The brief lands as the fight over the East Wing has become a test of how far the White House can go with private money and limited public funds. The administration has said a statute allowing routine maintenance and repairs to the executive mansion covers the privately funded $400 million demolition and construction project. Congress, meanwhile, has appropriated about $2.5 million for repairs, a sum the lawmakers said is nowhere near enough to support a full-scale reconstruction.
Robert Garcia did not try to soften the politics. “President Trump is building a billion-dollar ballroom. Everyone should be disgusted by his illegal and unconstitutional vanity project. We are fighting this in court,” he said. The Democrats also wrote that “Congress does not fund largescale construction projects with drop-in-the-bucket funding,” a line aimed squarely at the administration’s claim that modest repair money can be stretched into authority for a far bigger build.
The dispute did not begin this week. The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit against Trump late last year, and in March a federal judge ruled that construction could not proceed until Congress green-lit the project. A panel of appellate judges then temporarily allowed construction to continue and is set to hear arguments next week. That means the work is moving while the legal ground beneath it is still shifting.
Other challengers have widened the pressure. On Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Campaign Legal Center filed amicus briefs arguing that taking ballroom donations from companies and individuals with business before the government creates a conflict of interest. Their lawyers called the arrangement “a check against both Executive extravagance and the risk of corrupting influence.” A separate brief from a consortium of architects and preservationists argued that the president has no inherent authority to order the destruction of historic federal property inside a national park and then use private funds to build a massive ballroom.
At the same time, White House officials are pushing Republicans in Congress to approve $1 billion in security enhancements for Trump’s ballroom. The White House has said the ballroom itself has been paid for by donors such as Apple, Meta and Amazon, while the proposed security package would add a below-ground bunker, bulletproof glass, a roof that hides a counteroffensive drone port and rocket launchers. The bunker is being built with money Congress appropriated last year for White House security, even though Trump ripped out the existing bunker when he bulldozed the East Wing last year without first securing funding from Congress.
The administration is also trying to reframe the project as a security necessity. Todd Blanche has argued in recent filings that reconstruction of the East Wing is a matter of national security, pointing to the shootings at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last Saturday. A Trump aide put the political stakes even more bluntly, saying, “Republicans are just going to have to suck it up and get it done.”
For now, the legal question is simple even if the politics are not: can the White House keep tearing down and rebuilding without Congress saying yes first? The lawmakers who filed Thursday’s brief say no, and next week’s appellate hearing may determine whether that answer stops the project or only slows it down.
