A federal judge barred the Trump administration from cutting down any more trees and demanded at least 10 days’ notice before any major changes to the golf course at East Potomac Park on the National Mall.
Judge Ana Reyes said she was moving to head off a repeat of earlier this month, when the National Park Service toppled hundreds of trees on the golf course with less than a day’s notice, given late on a Friday before a holiday weekend.
She said she’s convinced President Trump’s desire to rebuild the gold course was behind the tree trimming, and now that Mr. Trump has said he wants work on his redesign to begin immediately, she is taking steps to prevent that.
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She brushed aside government lawyers’ contentions that Mr. Trump’s remarks on social media aren’t official policy, saying she believes the president over his underlings.
“There is a plan to close the Course soon even if the implementation date remains in some flux,” she concluded in a ruling late Monday night.
Judge Reyes added that those plans likely violate the National Environmental Policy Act, so she issued a preliminary injunction barring more tree-cutting and any future redesign work without 10 days’ notice.
“The events surrounding this case have become extraordinary. The legal result is not. A lower federal court enjoining an administrative agency from proceeding as the president wants,” she wrote.
Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, has been furious at the administration for several weeks now, expressing a sense of betrayal at the tree cutting.
She had previously directed the government not to do any major work on the course, but had declined to issue an actual order to that effect, saying she trusted the government. So the Oct. 10 cutting of more than 400 trees was a shock, she said.
She has spent the days since trying to get to the bottom of why it happened.
Government officials testified that they were carrying out a 2019 plan that called for returning the historic public course to the more open links-style layout from a century ago.
Judge Reyes suspected another motive, believing higher-ups at the Interior Department were actually moving to prepare for work on Mr. Trump’s vision.
Just when things seemed to have settled down, Mr. Trump stepped in with a series of social media posts saying he was going to begin work on the redesign, had struck a deal with a prominent course designer and work would begin “immediately.”
Judge Reyes said that was more believable than the denials from the National Park Service’s chief.
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