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- A hearing on Trump’s ballroom gets heated
A hearing on Trump’s ballroom gets heated
Speakers weighing in during a marathon session yesterday included architects, preservationists, and a Labrador retriever from New Orleans named Willie; “If you want to sue me, I’ll see you in court”
Christopher Hawthorne
March 06, 2026
A rendering of the proposed White House ballroom, with the Executive Residence at left. Via National Capital Planning Commission
Since its founding in 1924, the National Capital Planning Commission (née the National Capital Park Commission) has had some design-world heavyweights serve as chair, including the architects William Wurster and David Childs and the urban planner Harland Bartholomew. Its current leader, Will Scharf, is a lawyer who helped prep Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh for his confirmation hearings and now serves in the Trump administration as Assistant to the President and White House Staff Secretary.
He is one of several loyalists Trump has appointed to the commission despite their lack of experience in architecture or urban design. Another is Paul Ingrassia, a lawyer whose nomination to head the Office of Special Counsel collapsed last year after Politico reported that he’d confessed, in a group chat “with a half-dozen Republican operatives and influencers,” that he has “a Nazi streak in me from time to time.”
In general, Scharf maintained a solicitous tone during yesterday’s NCPC marathon review of the giant White House ballroom project, which has drawn more than 35,000 written comments from the public. (According to the Washington Post, which used AI to sort through them, more than 97% are critical of the design.) But things turned combative when one of the dozens of public speakers during the virtual session sharply questioned Scharf’s credentials and those of the other recent appointees.
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