Trump’s triumphal arch will cause a slew of ‘adverse’ effects, administration admits — but its plans are staying

By Sunlen Serfaty, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch will have “adverse” effects on dozens of historical landmarks, the National Park Service found.

Nonetheless, the agency concluded in a report released Friday that the arch must stay at the proposed site on the banks of the Potomac River as the project is “inherently location dependent” and “not interchangeable” with any other placement.

“A relocated arch elsewhere in Washington, D.C. or Virginia would constitute a materially different commemorative project,” the report said. “For this reason, alternative locations outside Memorial Circle are not reasonable avoidance alternatives.”

Among the adverse effects to surrounding landmarks, the 133-page report found that the arch would alter the “design continuity” of iconic Washington settings and would alter views of surrounding monuments.

The National Parks Service is part of the Department of the Interior that oversees the land where the president wants to construct the arch.

Its report comes as legal wrangling continues over the proposed arch. Critics, including historical conservation experts, veterans’ groups and the public have raised objections to the project due to concerns over preservation, changes to the Washington landscape and the limits of Trump’s authorities.

Location, location, location

The proposed site of the arch is on a traffic circle, Memorial Circle, on an island in the Potomac River directly across from Arlington National Cemetery on the Virginia side and the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington D.C. side.

“The same characteristics that make Memorial Circle sensitive from a preservation perspective are also the characteristics that make it the historically appropriate location for the undertaking,” NPS said.

“The project’s effects therefore could not be fully avoided without either relocating the Arch away from the historically identified site or eliminating the principal commemorative feature, both of which would fail to meet the undertaking’s purpose and need.”

The analysis disclosed that at least three dozen historical landmarks would be affected by the arch, with the most serious “adverse” effects concentrated on six landmarks near the arch, including Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial corridor and Arlington House, which is a memorial to Robert E. Lee featuring the home where he lived before he left to lead the Confederate army during the Civil War.

When completed, the arch will be seen all the way to the US Capitol, the Georgetown waterfront and the Pentagon, among other viewpoints.

“Every time the Park Service looks harder at this site – the ceremonial gateway between Washington and Arlington National Cemetery – it finds more historic places this arch would stand in front of,” said Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association. “Widening that assessment is the right thing to do, and it makes it that much harder to justify a 250-foot arch here.”

NPS said it did consider different alternatives – including a smaller arch, a relocation of the arch altogether, a no-build option and eliminating the proposed statues on top. But none of those alternatives were taken up because they would either have “greater impacts to historic properties or would not meet the location-dependent purpose of the undertaking,” the agency concluded.

It also proposed a long list of efforts that could be undertaken to “mitigate” the effects of the arch including creating a meadow management program for nearby Lady Bird Johnson Park and developing an interpretive program on the Lincoln-Arlington House corridor, among others. However, the report acknowledged that “mitigation measures that document, interpret, or compensate for adverse effects after they occur do not negate an adverse effect finding.”

Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation and among a chief critic of the project, said: “If the goal of the federal review is to ‘avoid, minimize, or mitigate’ negative impacts on designated cultural and historic resources, the administration has opted for willful blindness, knowing full well that the Arch will forever disrupt the symbolic and visual connections between the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy gravesite and Eternal Flame, and Arlington National Cemetery, and scores of revered sites throughout the area.”

Birnbaum told CNN, “Congress, through its failure to act, is shamefully complicit.”

Trump first proposed the arch in 2025, with plans released in April of this year. It has since been mired in disputes.

A high-profile lawsuit from Vietnam veterans and preservationists has argued that the project would dishonor the service of veterans by obstructing the view to Arlington National Cemetery and “would degrade their personal experience when visiting Arlington Cemetery or traveling around Memorial Circle and on the Memorial Avenue Corridor.” It also raised concerns over potential hazards related to its location near a runway at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

However, plans for the arch have been marching their way through approvals in independent agencies stacked with Trump loyalists responsible for oversight of construction in the nation’s capital.

The project was approved by the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and has a preliminary green light from the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), the two key federal agencies which oversee architecture and design changes in DC.

The NCPC has not given final go ahead yet for the project.

An upcoming September meeting of the commission was widely expected to be when the project would be reviewed for final approval, yet it is not on the September agenda.

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