Trump Officials Cite a Century-Old Report As Congressional Approval for 250-Foot DC Arch, in a Move Called ‘Tortured’ and ‘Laughable’

Trump does not need Congressional approval to build a proposed 250-foot arch on Washington, DC’s Memorial Circle, on Columbia Island, officials are arguing, because a century-old report once called for a pair of 166-foot columns there, reports the Washington Post.

Memorial Circle is managed by the National Parks Service and is classified as protected land, meaning Congress must authorize the construction of monuments there. The Post’s sources say that the Trump administration has no plans to ask Congress’s permission. Instead, Trump officials are citing as justification for the arch a 1924 report by a federal commission that designed the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which initially was to include a pair of 166-foot columns topped by statues. These were never built. 

“Congress authorized the arch project when it approved the design set out in Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission’s report,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing last month, the Post reports.

Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, cited the report in a meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts in April, notes the paper, saying, “President Trump believes that this year’s celebration of 250 years of American independence is the perfect moment to finally realize this long-standing, over-century-old vision, but yet unfilled vision for Columbia Island.” Burgum even noted that columns that are part of Trump’s arch project are 166 feet tall, though those columns, in Trump’s design, are surmounted by pedestals and statuary that will drive the project to its proposed 250-foot height.

“The notion Congress a century ago authorized construction of this 250-foot arch in Memorial Circle is absurd,” Wendy Liu, a lawyer at Public Citizen Litigation Group, told the Post, adding that the authorization the administration is citing stipulated a 10-year construction and funding schedule. “It did not authorize this arch,” said Liu.

California Democratic Congressional representative Jared Huffman has called the administration’s argument “tortured” and “laughable,” notes the paper. Huffman and other top Democrats have mounted a legal challenge to the arch, and sent a letter to Republicans on the Natural Resources Committee demanding an oversigh hearing into what they call Trump’s “vanity projects.”

Trump introduced the project last October, at a dinner in honor of donors to his proposed ballroom project (to which a US District Court judge argued in March must be stopped), and in December he called it his top domestic policy priority. Veterans brought a lawsuit to stop the project, saying it would blight the nearby Arlington National Cemetery and other nearby monuments. The Trump administration released a design for the arch last month, and days later the Commission of Fine Arts, stocked with supporters, gave preliminary approval to the project, though its vice chairman proposed eliminating statues of golden eagles and a winged angel that would give it a third of its height, the New York Times reported. 

The arch is just one of Trump’s proposed projects that would change the DC landscape. He also has called for a new “National Garden of Heroes,” funded through federal arts and cultural grants that were initially distributed to arts organizations through federal agencies like the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Funding initially destined for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), meanwhile, has been funneled to mobile “museums” of American history on flatbed trucks, traveling the US in an educational road show.