Court filing revealed Trump had appointed ballroom's own architect and three loyalists to the commission required to approve it

A court filing submitted January 15, 2026 in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's lawsuit seeking to halt construction of Trump's White House ballroom revealed that President Trump had appointed four new members to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), one of two federal bodies -- alongside the National Capital Planning Commission -- that must review and approve the ballroom project. The White House did not separately announce the appointments; they surfaced in a sworn declaration from Heather Martin, deputy director of the White House Office of Administration, filed in the case. The appointees are Mary Anne Carter, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and a close friend of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles; conservative art critic and commentator Roger Kimball; Matthew Taylor, a White House official working on Trump's proposed National Garden of American Heroes; and architect James McCrery, who had already been hired separately to lead the ballroom's own construction. A source close to the process told CNN there was apprehension the reconstituted board would simply "rubber stamp" the ballroom and other Trump-directed projects.

The CFA, established by Congress in 1910, advises the federal government on the design of public buildings, national memorials, and coins and medals, and holds review authority over changes to the White House complex. Trump had fired all six of the board's prior members -- Biden appointees serving statutory four-year terms -- by email in October 2025 as East Wing demolition for the ballroom got underway, leaving the commission without a quorum and its advisory work "ground to a halt," per CNN. The same court filing showed the Justice Department arguing to the presiding judge that Congress has "almost exclusively entrusted these renovations to the President's discretion," urging rejection of the preservation group's suit for lack of standing.

The exact date the appointments themselves were made is not established in the public record; CNN reported only that they occurred "this week" before the Thursday, January 15 court filing that disclosed them. This entry is dated to that disclosure.

Updates

2026-02-19 — CFA approved ballroom design without reviewing final plans [6]

On February 19, 2026, the reconstituted Commission of Fine Arts voted to approve the White House ballroom design without having reviewed the project's final design, according to NPR, which reported the panel "has been packed with President Trump's allies." Architect Shalom Baranes told the commission Trump had personally signed off on removing a pediment from the design after pushback at an earlier meeting; new CFA chairman Rodney Mims Cook Jr. called the change sufficient to satisfy the commission's concerns. NPR reported the commission received what its secretary called an unprecedented volume of public comment opposed to the project.