President Donald Trump this week appointed four members to the Commission of Fine Arts, restoring a quorum to the federal panel that must review his proposed 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom addition. The appointments, revealed in court papers filed Thursday, set up a Jan. 22 commission meeting at which the administration’s East Wing Modernization project is on the agenda. The panel had been unable to meet for months after Trump dismissed six of its members last fall.
The moves come as the National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to halt construction, arguing the Trump administration violated federal law by beginning demolition of the East Wing before the project received required independent reviews from two federal commissions and Congress, and before a public comment period.
The four new members
Among the appointees is James McCrery, the architect who led the ballroom project until Trump replaced him late last year. McCrery previously served on the commission as a Trump appointee from 2019 to 2024. The other three new members are Mary Anne Carter of Tennessee, who chairs the National Endowment for the Arts and held that post during Trump’s first term; Roger Kimball of Connecticut, an art critic and conservative commentator; and Matthew Taylor of Washington, D.C. Carter previously worked as a staffer for Rick Scott, a former Florida governor and current U.S. senator.
The four new members were disclosed in court filings by Heather Martin, a deputy assistant to the president, as part of the historic preservation lawsuit.
The ballroom project
Trump has discussed building a White House ballroom for years. The proposed addition, to be built in place of the demolished East Wing, would measure 90,000 square feet and permanently alter the public face of the mansion. The White House has said the project will be financed with private donations, including from Trump himself.
The Commission of Fine Arts normally has seven members. Trump dismissed six last fall after the East Wing was torn down; a seventh member, who served as the panel’s chair, had resigned earlier after Trump took office because that member’s term had expired. The dismissals left the panel without a quorum for months.
Review timeline
The White House is tentatively scheduled to formally present the project to the commission on Feb. 19 and March 19, at which point the panel could complete its review, Martin said in the court filings.
A second federal body with oversight authority over construction on federal land, the National Capital Planning Commission, heard an initial presentation about the ballroom at its Jan. 8 meeting. Both commissions must approve the project under federal law, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation has argued in its federal lawsuit that construction began improperly before either panel had reviewed the plans.