(The Epoch Times)—A federal district judge on Dec. 17 allowed the ongoing ballroom construction project at the White House to continue, turning away a preservation organization’s request to halt it, at least for the time being.
The litigation is still underway, and a court hearing is scheduled for January.
Construction on the project, which involves demolishing part of the executive mansion and building a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, began in September. The project is expected to cost about $300 million, all of which is expected to be funded by private donors, including President Donald Trump himself. The Trump administration released a list of the private donors in October.
Trump has said the ballroom project is necessary because the East Room—the largest room for gatherings in the White House—is too small and in poor shape. A government official said in a declaration filed with the court that the facilities at the White House are inadequate for large-scale events, which are instead held on the lawn, under tents.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit against Trump and federal agencies on Dec. 12 over the project. The National Trust is a private, charitable, educational nonprofit corporation that Congress chartered in 1949.
The legal complaint, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sought a judicial declaration that the project violates several federal statutes.
The National Trust also asked for an injunction to pause work on the project “until the necessary federal commissions have reviewed and approved the project’s plans; adequate environmental review has been conducted; and Congress has authorized the Ballroom’s construction,” according to the complaint.
In his new order, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied the group’s request for a temporary restraining order, but deferred his ruling on the request for a preliminary injunction until after the court conducts a hearing in January.
Leon said he was rejecting the plaintiff’s argument that he should stop the project because the group believes it would be harmed by not being allowed to participate “in the review process for the proposed ballroom.”
The judge noted in his order that the federal government has said it would begin “consultation processes with the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts by the end of the month.”
“The Court will hold the Government to its word,” he added.
Leon also rejected the plaintiff’s claim of “aesthetic harm,” noting that such a claim could not be evaluated because plans for the ballroom have not been finalized.
Aesthetic harm takes place when an unpleasing alteration to property diminishes its value or the extent to which people enjoy it. Courts have recognized aesthetic harm as a legitimate basis for standing in lawsuits. Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify their participation in a lawsuit.
Although below-grade demolition and excavation at the East Wing are underway, the government has said below-grade structural work will not commence “until January 2026 for the colonnade and February 2026 for the ballroom,” the judge said.
The judge said that at the court’s Dec. 16 hearing, the government indicated that “nothing about the ballroom has been finalized, including its size and scale.” Based on those representations, “there is no sufficiently imminent risk of irreparable aesthetic harm warranting a temporary restraining order halting construction,” he added.
The court “takes seriously” the government’s representations that the building plans are not yet final, that it will consult with the National Capital Planning Commission and Commission of Fine Arts by month’s end, and that “no above-grade construction will take place before April 2016,” the judge said.
At the hearing on Dec. 16, Leon previewed how he would rule, saying he was unlikely to block the construction project for now.
He said at that time that any violation of the plaintiff’s procedural right to comment on the plans before the project got underway was probably not enough to show irreparable harm, and did not justify the National Trust’s request for a temporary emergency block.
Stacy Robinson contributed to this report.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.