President Trump has moved to ensure approval of his planned White House ballroom by placing four allies on an arts commission that must sign off on the project for it to go ahead. According to court filings and the White House, Trump named architect James McCrery, art critic Roger Kimball, National Endowment for the Arts chair Mary Anne Carter, and National Endowment for the Humanities official Matthew Taylor to the US Commission of Fine Arts this week, the Washington Post reports. The commission postponed a look at the plans this week because Trump hadn't replaced the members he fired in October, per the New York Times.
McCrery is the architect Trump picked to design the ballroom in the first place; he was replaced after apparently differing with the president. The White House did not say whether he would recuse himself from evaluating a project he helped plan. The commission, which advises the president on major design decisions in Washington, is one of two independent agencies evaluating the new ballroom, billed by Trump as the biggest alteration to the White House complex in decades. The National Capital Planning Commission, on which the president already has placed loyalists, per CNN, is the other. It's led by Trump aides Will Scharf and James Blair.
Administration lawyers told a federal court they aim to secure approvals from both commissions in March and begin aboveground construction in April. The appointments were revealed in court documents in a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is trying to hold up the project until it's approved by the agencies and Congress, per CBS News. Trump has described the ballroom as on time and under budget.
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