Washington — A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s closure of a historic golf course and park in Washington, D.C., that President Trump wants to overhaul into a new “world class championship” course.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled that the Trump administration cannot close East Potomac Park and its golf course, but said that the Trump administration was not required to actively manage either.
She sided with a D.C. preservation group and two local golfers who argued that closure of East Potomac Park, set for Sunday, Nov. 15, was part of the Trump administration’s plan to redesign and replace the course with a championship-style venue designed by golf course architect Tom Fazio.
Reyes said that the Trump administration’s justifications for the proposed course closures were pretextual, and said, “the Government reverse-engineers additional justifications for the Park’s closure… All while it continues to assert that it will close the Park to follow the President’s directive.”
Her order will last until Nov. 28.
Reyes has for months been overseeing a challenge to the president’s plans for East Potomac Golf Links, a public course in Washington that opened in the 1920s. The dispute escalated last month when the National Park Service notified the judge that it would be removing trees on the course and went on to cut down more than 500 trees in the span of a weekend.
Reyes then issued an order blocking the Trump administration from felling any additional trees, and required the Justice Department to provide her with notice of any future actions the National Park Service planned to take at the golf course.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, announced last month that East Potomac would close Nov. 15 to allow work on the new design by Fazio to begin, with the renovated “world-class, championship course” expected to open in roughly 15 months.
But in a court hearing Friday, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said he “would be shocked to learn there is a contract” with Fazio or any affiliated entities finalizing the new course plans and future construction.
Following Mr. Trump’s announcement, the Justice Department notified the court late last month that the Interior Department was working on a plan to close the course and would also temporarily shut off the public’s access to all of East Potomac Park, which encompasses not only the golf course, but also a road, playground and recreational space.
The Trump administration argued that the entirety of the park had to be closed because of a deteriorating sea wall, safety risks at the golf course, and because the organization that was overseeing the course, the National Links Trust, would cease operating it as of Nov. 15.
There is no plan currently in place to fix the sea wall, according to the National Park Service, and it’s unclear how long East Potomac Park will be closed for. The new sea wall is expected to cost more than $300 million and take at least two-and-a-half years to complete, according to a proposal for the new golf course that the National Park Service submitted to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts last week.
The Trump administration said in a notice published Friday that it will be soliciting a contract for work related to 20,700 linear feet of shortline and sea wall infrastructure.
Lawyers for the preservation group and golfers said the Trump administration had manufactured a situation where the course would no longer have an operator, the National Links Trust, as of Nov. 15, and found areas of disrepair in East Potomac Park that needed to be fixed, effectively reverse-engineering the decision to close the area.
Reyes, too, pushed the Justice Department on whether Mr. Trump’s order to shutter the park to overhaul the golf course was the real reason for the Nov. 15 closure date, or whether it was because of a longstanding need for repairs at the park, and the Trump administration was simply closing the park to effectuate those fixes.
“If this is such an emergent situation… why wasn’t [East Potomac] closed immediately?” Reyes asked the government, noting that thousands of runners participating in the Marine Corps Marathon ran through East Potomac Park just last month.
Fazio’s new course design shows it taking up the entirety of East Potomac Park, eliminating the existing road around the peninsula and recreational space at its southern end.
Adam Gustafson, a Justice Department lawyer, said that the government has “limited resources and discretion” and “when the president talks, the agencies listen.”
“The agency has said consistently that it will comply with the law in reaching a final position on the deposition of this park,” Gustafson said.
He argued that closing the park does not mean the Trump administration will immediately begin renovating the course, since the National Park Service still has to continue a legal analysis and assessments under federal environmental and historic preservation laws. The Commission of Fine Arts and National Capital Planning Commission must also conduct their own reviews, Gustafson said.
The NCPC is set to consider the proposal for the new course at a Dec. 3 meeting.
Separately, Reyes has also opened an inquiry into whether top Trump administration officials in the Department of Interior, Justice Department, and National Park Service misrepresented facts to her in recent court hearings and documents and violated ethics rules.
Reyes said she intends to appoint a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Jessie Liu, to lead the probe, which will include whether government lawyers told Jessica Bowron, the acting director of the National Park Service, and Kevin Griess, superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks, to omit or include certain information in declarations about work at the golf course.
The Justice Department opposes the appointment of a special master.
