WASHINGTON — No more trees come down at East Potomac Golf Course for now. A federal judge on Monday barred the government from cutting or damaging any more of them, ruling that the Interior Department had already made a final decision to replace the park’s three courses with a single championship-style layout — and that it likely broke environmental law getting there.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes issued a preliminary injunction covering the park. Beyond the trees, her order requires the government to give 10 business days’ written notice before it makes any irreversible change to East Potomac Park’s features while the lawsuit runs its course.
In a 70-page memorandum opinion, Reyes found the plaintiffs likely to succeed on their claim under the National Environmental Policy Act. The agencies, she concluded, likely violated the law by reviewing the tree clearing on its own instead of weighing its effects together with the larger redevelopment it served.
Monday’s ruling does not end the case. Reyes also gave the government until 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28, to explain why she should not order it — Justice Department attorneys and staff included — to preserve information about whether the plan existed, when the trees were removed, and what notice the plaintiffs and the court received.
At the heart of the fight sits a simple question: did the Interior Department ever actually decide on a renovation? Government lawyers said no final plan existed, which would put the project largely beyond the court’s reach.
President Donald Trump said otherwise, in public. In an Oct. 18 post on Truth Social, he wrote that the department had developed a plan for a championship course under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, working with golf architect Tom Fazio. Work would begin Nov. 15, he said. The existing course would close to play that day, and the new one would open in roughly 15 months.
Hours before a hearing on Oct. 19, Trump posted again. Work would begin “IMMEDIATELY!” he wrote.
Inside the courtroom, the government’s own witnesses distanced themselves from those dates. Interior and National Park Service officials testified they knew of no planned Nov. 15 closure and no work scheduled to start then. A deputy assistant attorney general told the court the president “is not an agency.”
Reyes was unpersuaded. The Justice Department, she wrote, had in effect asked the court not to believe the sitting president. If Trump had it wrong, Burgum was free to say so. He never did.
Nor did the judge rest her finding on the posts alone. Burgum had announced a championship course and unveiled a Fazio design back in May. The government had dumped soil on the property, terminated its operator’s lease and cleared hundreds of trees. Taken together, Reyes found, the plan existed and counted as final agency action for purposes of the preliminary ruling, even with details still murky.
The tree cutting itself began with almost no warning. Government lawyers notified the court and the plaintiffs of a new tree management plan at 4:55 p.m. on Oct. 9, the Friday before a holiday weekend. Crews started cutting the next morning.
By the end of Oct. 10, the Park Service had taken down nearly 430 trees, according to the opinion. Its environmental paperwork had identified 529 healthy trees for removal under the plan. Crews also found and removed 200 more trees that the initial documentation never mentioned, and the Park Service later completed an environmental adequacy determination to cover them.
Reyes found most of the felled trees were healthy and noninvasive. She rejected the government’s explanation that the work was routine maintenance under a 2019 Park Service cultural landscape report, calling that account pretextual.
That report cuts against the government in a second way. It did recommend targeted removals to restore the course’s open, links-style landscape — but it also recommended keeping all three courses, so players of different abilities could use them.
The clearing, Reyes found, was not an independent restoration effort. It was one piece of the bigger redevelopment, and she found its timing and the late notice were calculated to keep the plaintiffs from reaching a judge in time. Two Park Service officials testified there had been no urgency to the work.
Credibility findings followed. Gregory Wischer, deputy chief of staff to the interior secretary, was found not credible. An October declaration by Jessica Bowron, the Park Service comptroller and acting director, was found misleading because it left out the tree management plan — though Reyes credited Bowron’s oral testimony, said she did not fault her, and noted Bowron testified she had relied on government counsel’s advice about the omission.
The government’s legal defenses fared no better. Reyes pointed out that its lawyers had previously assured the court a full redesign would be a major federal action requiring environmental review — assurances the court relied on when it turned away earlier requests for relief — and she declined to accept the opposite position now, rejecting it on the merits as well.
She also rejected the argument that environmental segmentation claims died with a 2025 Supreme Court decision and the repeal of NEPA’s implementing regulations in January 2026. Neither development, she found, eliminated the claim that the agencies improperly split one redevelopment into smaller pieces to dodge review. The agencies had leaned on categorical exclusions, which let qualifying actions proceed without an environmental assessment or impact statement; Reyes found the clearing belonged to a larger project whose effects likely had to be considered as a whole. Earlier in the case, she had denied the government’s motion to disqualify her for bias.
The lawsuit arrived in February, filed by the D.C. Preservation League and two regulars at the course, Dave Roberts and Alex Dickson. They are challenging what the litigation calls the Washington National Plan — one Fazio-designed course, built for professional tournaments, where three courses stand today.
Until October, this court had denied roughly a dozen requests for relief in the case. Reyes said she acted when she did because the government removed hundreds of trees without meaningful advance notice, despite what it had told the court before.
Roberts and Dickson play the courses regularly, including with their children. Replacing the layouts with a championship course would harm their recreational interests, Reyes found, including their use of the beginner-friendly Red Course. The preservation league established standing through its member and executive director, Rebecca Miller; it did not establish standing based on injury to the organization itself.
East Potomac’s history runs deep. It opened in 1920, designed by Walter J. Travis to serve golfers of varying abilities. In 1941 it became one of the first public courses in the country to integrate, after Black golfers played a round under police escort.
More recently, the grounds have absorbed the Trump administration’s rebuilding elsewhere. In October 2025 the government placed more than 30,000 cubic yards of soil from the demolished White House East Wing on the course. Two months later the Park Service terminated its lease with the operator, National Links Trust, though the trust has kept running daily operations.
Reyes closed by calling the circumstances around the case extraordinary and the legal result ordinary: an injunction against federal agencies while their actions undergo judicial review. The ruling can be appealed.
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