Six local preservation and cultural heritage organizations said work must stop on the statue garden in West Potomac Park until Congress authorizes the project.
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A coalition of Washington-area preservation and cultural heritage organizations on Monday sued the Trump administration over President Donald Trump’s plan to remake national parkland with a massive statuary garden.
The groups said that Trump’s planned “National Garden of American Heroes” — which the president has said would feature life-size statues of roughly 250 Americans and be built in West Potomac Park — must be halted until Congress authorizes the project.
Trump officials have already begun to commission statues and secure funding to build the garden on a large field that is an extension of the National Mall, and the president and his deputies have repeatedly said the project is moving forward.
“Congress put clear laws in place to safeguard the National Mall from new construction and to ensure the public has a meaningful voice in decisions about landscapes that belong to them, as space open to all,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, president and CEO for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of six groups and one named Washington resident in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. White House officials previously have said they would follow “all legal requirements and approvals” for the planned garden but have not specified whether that includes obtaining congressional approval.
Trump pursued a smaller version of the statue garden during his first administration, but efforts stalled when he left office and President Joe Biden rescinded work on the project. Trump revived the garden idea after he was reelected, expanding its size to 250 statues and saying it should be part of efforts to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.
“The National Garden of American Heroes is going to be unbelievable,” Trump said in the Oval Office this month, calling it a “very important” project.
Federal officials have already set aside millions of dollars for the project through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Congress last year also appropriated $40 million for the procurement of statues.
West Potomac Park, which sits along the Potomac River near the Jefferson Memorial and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, is among the most tightly controlled federal lands in the District of Columbia. Large portions fall within a designated reserve governed by the Commemorative Works Act, in which any new memorial project would probably require congressional approval as well as review by federal planning bodies.
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The law also says that a commemorative work “may not be authorized until after the 25th anniversary of the event, death of the individual, or death of the last surviving member of the group.”
Trump has previously said the project will feature statues of past presidents, civil rights leaders, scientists, athletes and entertainers. Several dozen people on previous lists released by the White House, including basketball player Kobe Bryant, singer Whitney Houston and former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, have died within the past 25 years.
The preservation groups Monday compared the garden project to Trump’s efforts to build a White House ballroom, towering triumphal arch and other construction projects that have similarly drawn lawsuits.
“This disregard for legal requirements is part of the same playbook the administration has used to pursue other recent vanity projects,” the groups wrote in their filing.
The DC Preservation League, National Mall Coalition, Olmsted Network, Committee of 100 on the Federal City and Cultural Landscape Foundation joined the lawsuit, alongside Steve Longenecker, a D.C. resident who has used the park for recreation.
“If you’re fundraising for this activity, you are further along than the public seems to know, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve filed this suit,” said Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League. “We don’t want a situation where the administration, like they did on the ballroom … comes out of nowhere and destroys the landscape.”
Miller also said that Congress’s appropriation of $40 million last year for statue procurement was not equivalent to formally authorizing the garden, which would be a more involved process.
Some Washington residents have said they were worried about losing access to the park’s fields, which are used by local sports leagues and for informal recreation.
Trump last month criticized the state of the park as “a totally BARREN field of Prime Waterfront Real Estate,” casting his planned garden as part of his initiative to remake Washington. A new organization called the National Garden of American Heroes Foundation has also circulated a fundraising pitch for the project, which was obtained by The Washington Post.
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Rick Maese contributed to this report.
