A federal judge called out President Donald Trump by name and openly mocked his administration's explanation for a sudden tree-cutting operation at a Washington golf course,
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes rejected the government's claim that officials removed hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links following recommendations from a 2019 preservation report in her opinion issued Tuesday.
She said they were acting out of the president’s impatience. “The Court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the [tree-management plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old,” she wrote per The Washington Post.
The administration claimed that the cutting was not related to Trump’s plan to remodel the public golf course into a championship-ready venue, but Reyes was not buying it.
She noted that the government wanted the court to believe that officials moved ahead with the project shortly after Trump instructed the Interior Department to cut trees, despite the recommendations having sat for seven years, was too coincidental for her liking.
Reyes mocked the admin’s excuse, writing "that asks rather a lot of coincidence."
The judge's ruling referred to an operation that proceeded with remarkable speed, even though two National Park Service officials had said there was no urgent need to carry it out.
The process started on October 5 when Gregory Wischer, a senior official of the Interior Department, instructed the Park Service to act on the earlier report as soon as possible. The following day, an acting agency director gave his approval of the plan.
On Friday afternoon, the government's lawyers informed the court that the felling would start on Saturday morning. They then took away about 430 healthy, noninvasive trees and nearly 300 more trees were marked for removal.
Reyes also raised doubts about the way the agency evaluated the environmental consequences; the Park Service had granted an initial exemption from more in-depth review just one day before the work started and then produced another document on Sunday, after the crews had felled many more trees than had been originally planned.
"The environmental impact? Unstudied. The urgency? None," she wrote.
The administration argues that the work is a separate maintenance effort consistent with restoring the course's historic landscape. Preservationists and two local golfers accuse officials of breaking Trump's larger redevelopment plan into smaller projects to evade necessary scrutiny.
Reyes found the challengers likely to succeed in arguing that the Park Service had failed to properly study the environmental impact under federal law.
Her order bars further cutting through Oct. 26 and requires three business days' notice before any permanent feature of the course is irreversibly altered.
The judge also plans to question senior Interior and Park Service officials about the hurried operation.
The ruling leaves Trump's golf ambitions facing further courtroom scrutiny, with hundreds of trees already gone and the future of the redevelopment contested.
