The Court’s Ballroom Decision Is a Sign of Deeper Problems

In deciding to allow President Trump to proceed with constructing a new ballroom, which Congress has not authorized, at the White House, which Trump does not own, the U.S.

Supreme Court invoked the separation of powers.

But the Court got the constitutional problem precisely backwards: The separation-of-powers problem isn’t that courts are impermissibly blocking the president’s use of taxpayer funds to create a ballroom.

It’s that the president is impermissibly using unauthorized taxpayer funds to create a ballroom.

The Court’s missteps were many, starting in the very first sentence of its opinion : “In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House.” (The opinion, decided via the Court’s shadow docket, was per curiam, meaning that it did not indicate an author, but because the four dissenters noted their names, we know the five justices in the majority were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.) But the federal government didn’t begin replacing part of the White House.

Only the president and the executive branch did.

Under the U.S.

Constitution, the president is not the be-all and end-all of the federal government.

Far from it: The legislature, Congress, is the body that has the power to establish and regulate federal property (including the White House) and to authorize the spending of federal funds.

Indeed, the plaintiff in the case—the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States—argued that the president was proceeding without congressional authorization and in violation of federal laws.

The Supreme Court majority did not say otherwise, making no claim as to whether the ballroom-construction project was legal or whether the president had the authority to undertake it.

The Supreme Court’s conflation of the president with the federal government is the latest iteration in the Court’s steady embrace of the unitary-executive theory and the accompanying expansion of executive power.

This theory maintains that all executive power resides in the president, and that Congress cannot limit the president’s exercise of that power.

Yet these days, the president, occasionally with the Court’s blessing, is claiming to possess legislative powers too.