It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white.
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”
Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”
According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.
