Background: Washington, D.C. – October 12: View of East Potomac Golf Links as a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop cutting down trees at Washington, D.C.’s East Potomac Golf Links, October 12, 2026. (mpi34/mediaPunch /IPX). Inset left: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in June 2022 during her confirmation hearings (Sen. Dick Durbin/YouTube). Inset right: President Donald Trump speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A federal judge elaborated upon her frustration with the Trump administration and her reasoning for blocking the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) from cutting down more trees at Washington, D.C.’s East Potomac Golf Links at President Donald Trump’s apparent urging.
In a 21-page order granting two golfers’ and an environmental advocacy organization’s emergency motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO), U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes expressed how the federal government “did precisely what Plaintiffs feared” by chopping down noninvasive trees that were ordered to be protected.
Perhaps worse, Reyes went on, they did it essentially behind the golfers’, organization’s and judge’s backs, and sought to do it again. The self-professed “furious” judge on Monday excoriated the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attorneys for doing “your absolute worst,” and on Wednesday put in writing how the case will proceed.
Beginning in 2025, DOI and National Park Service (NPS) decided to turn the East Potomac Golf Links into a “championship-style golf course.” The golfers and advocacy organization, the D.C. Preservation League, sued in February 2026 to stop the overhaul, arguing that it was being rushed at the expense of proper environmental and administrative reviews.
Specifically, the plaintiffs said the administration’s Washington National Plan, which includes the Tree Management Plan (TMP), would violate the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which “requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions,” as well as the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which governs how federal agencies can make and enforce rules.
Despite the golfers’ request and warnings, Reyes declined to grant a TRO, saying she did “not want to be the overseer of Parks and Rec” and stressing how she had no reason to believe the administration would act in bad faith and do anything more than “ordinary maintenance” and remove trees that were “hazardous, dead, dying, or invasive” before Tuesday.
Then, last week rolled around.
In five days — from Oct. 5 to Oct. 9 — DOI “ordered, considered, and approved a plan to remove hundreds of trees from the East Potomac Golf Course,” Reyes wrote, adding that by “[e]arly the next morning,” NPS had bulldozers at the site. “By day’s end, it had removed about 430 healthy, non-invasive trees,” the Joe Biden appointee added.
She said that such a “coordinated” effort required the work of DOI leaders, such as Superintendent of the National Mall and Memorial Parks Kevin Griess, who had assured her there was “no urgency” in the continuation of the tree removal. “Despite the lack of any urgency, people acted urgently,” Reyes wrote, also summarizing her opinion of the actions:
Breakneck speed to clear trees that posed no harm. The reason? Disputed. The budget? Unclear. The environmental impact? Unstudied. The urgency? None. Next steps: bulldoze hundreds more.
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As Law&Crime reported on Monday, Reyes pressed Griess as to why a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) was the justification for the mass tree removal at only one golf course on a holiday weekend. Instead, she opined, it seemed that an August social media post by Trump in which he declared work on the new course “will go quickly” provided a more likely reason.
“The Court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the TMP 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 CLR,” Reyes wrote on Wednesday. “It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course, and not, say, any other time in the last seven years.”
“That asks rather a lot of coincidence,” she added.
As for the golfers’ claim that the Trump administration violated NEPA — the law requiring federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the possible environmental ramifications of their actions — Reyes wrote that NPS “likely failed to comply with that statute’s procedural and ‘hard look’ requirements.”
The jurist concluded by barring the administration from removing additional trees until Oct. 26.
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