U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order yesterday blocking work on President Donald Trump’s triumphal arch. The arch will, according to the National Park Service, impact nine Civil War-related sites in the District of Columbia and Virginia. The order halts work on the site for fourteen days. The order came after the approval of the plan by the National Capital Planning Association, which is stocked with Trump’s allies.
The arch was proposed as a commemorative monument to Donald Trump or to the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independance, but over the summer the administration said that the arch was being built as a national security structure. In response, the judge wrote in her opinion, “The court appreciates the government’s significant interest in national security. But these recent and unsupported attestations of security aspects of a structure that has been extensively discussed over the last year appear nowhere in the planning documents on which the project was reviewed and approved.”
The judge said that the Trump Administration is “enjoined from initiating, making, or otherwise effectuating any construction, excavation, demolition, land-disturbance, utility installation, or roadway-closure activity, or any other construction-related activity at or near Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., that is for the purpose of constructing an arch at Memorial Circle.”
Judge Chutkan wrote in her Memorandum Opinion that:
Congress has stewarded Washington’s development throughout the twentieth century, passing multiple statutes to ensure continued oversight of the city’s planning and growth. See id. Accordingly, these statutes have imposed restrictions on construction projects in the District and its environs. In 1912, for example, Congress enacted a statute prohibiting construction of “any building or structure” on public, federal land in the District of Columbia “without express authority of Congress.” Act of Aug. 24, 1912, Pub. L. No. 62-302, ch. 355, 37 Stat. 417, 444 (formerly codified at 40 U.S.C. § 68). That command, perhaps “the most straightforward of Congress’s planning directives,” remains in force today. See DC Pres. League, 2026 WL 1506709, at *2. Now codified at 40 U.S.C. § 8106, the statute provides in full: “A building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”
Later in the twentieth century, Congress passed the Commemorative Works Act of 1986 (“CWA”), Pub. L. No. 99-652, 100 Stat. 3650 (codified as amended at 40 U.S.C. §§ 8901–8909), to “preserve the integrity of the comprehensive design of . . . the Nation’s Capital,” 40 U.S.C. § 8901(1). The CWA seeks to ensure that commemorative works on federally administered land are “appropriately designed, constructed, and located,” and that they “reflect a consensus of the lasting national significance of the subjects involved.” Id. § 8901(4). To this end, it imposes several procedural requirements for the construction of a “commemorative work,” defined as “any statue, monument, sculpture, memorial, plaque, inscription, or other structure . . . designed to perpetuate in a permanent manner the memory of an individual, group, event or other significant element of American history.” Id. § 8902(a)(1). The most salient of these is that any commemorative work erected in “areas administered by the National Park Service . . . in the District of Columbia and its environs” is to “be established . . . only as specifically authorized by law” by Congress, and “subject to applicable” procedures. Id. §§ 8901(4), 8903(a)(1), (a)(2). Among these procedures is the requirement of a “sponsor authorized by law to establish a commemorative work.”
The arch was never authorized under the existing laws.
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