A federal judge on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from closing East Potomac Golf Links and the surrounding parkland, preserving public access to the historic Hains Point property and handing preservation groups a significant victory in their legal effort to halt the president’s planned overhaul of the historic public course.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes granted preservation groups’ emergency request to stop the National Park Service from carrying out the closure planned for Sunday, finding that the government’s stated reasons for shutting down the property were “pretextual” and that the administration, “in its haste to meet an arbitrary deadline,” had probably violated federal environmental and administrative law.
“The Department of the Interior has progressed from removing the trees to removing the people from East Potomac Park,” Reyes wrote in the opening line of her 30-page ruling.
The decision is a significant setback for the administration, which had said it needed to close the property because of safety concerns and because National Links Trust, East Potomac’s longtime operator, was set to stop managing the facility. The government had sought to close East Potomac Park south of Buckeye Drive at the end of the day Sunday, but the ruling means the golf-course property, Ohio Drive and the rest of the park must remain open and accessible to the public through at least Nov. 28.
The ruling does not require the Park Service to continue offering golf, however, leaving it unclear whether golfers will be able to play after Sunday.
A Justice Department spokesperson noted that the Park Service can still “limit access to its facilities where the public is at risk of harm.”
“Nothing in the Court’s order precludes planning for the development of a world class golf course to continue,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The Department of Justice will always vociferously defend the Trump Administration’s agenda in court.”
After five hours of arguments at a hearing Friday, Reyes questioned whether either explanation justified shutting down the entire park — including its golf courses, walking and cycling routes, fishing areas and Ohio Drive.
Catherine Carroll, a senior legal adviser at Democracy Forward, which represents the preservation groups challenging the administration, praised the ruling.
“The administration’s inexplicable drive to destroy East Potomac Park would have taken away a treasured park that could never be replaced, and we are honored to work with this coalition to secure this temporary relief,” she said.
In Friday’s hearing, the administration acknowledged that it had no immediate plans to begin work on the golf course or repairs to a deteriorating seawall key to any project. It has not identified funding for the estimated $305 million seawall project and could not say how long the park would have been closed. The judge concluded that neither the seawall nor the lack of a golf operator adequately explained why the entire park suddenly needed to close Sunday.
“The Court, based on the current record, readily finds that these explanations are pretextual,” Reyes wrote.
Reyes’s order allows the Park Service to temporarily restrict access immediately around active seawall repairs or an “articulated, imminent” safety threat.
For the golf course, Reyes drew an unusual distinction: The government does not have to provide golf, hire another operator or enter into a new concession agreement, but it cannot use the absence of golf operations as a reason to keep the public off the property.
“While there are other parks in Washington, D.C.,” Reyes wrote, “there is no other East Potomac Park.”
At Friday’s hearing, Reyes repeatedly challenged the administration’s claim that safety concerns required an immediate, park-wide closure, noting that problems with the seawall had been documented by the Park Service for years.
If this was such an emergent safety issue … why wasn’t it shut down immediately?” she asked.
In her ruling, Reyes noted that the Park Service had identified the entire seawall as a safety hazard as far back as 2019 and had previously addressed dangerous sections by fencing them off. “[The] seawall’s condition did not materialize overnight,” Reyes wrote.
She also pointed to the Marine Corps Marathon, for which the Park Service allowed more than 30,000 runners to complete around the same perimeter just days before announcing the closure.
She said the government had not explained why repairs required closing the entire park rather than cordoning off dangerous areas as the agency had done previously.
The judge also questioned whether the administration had created the operator problem it now cites as a reason for closure.
In her ruling, she said the administration had “reverse-engineer[ed]” the absence of an operator into a justification for closure after Trump directed that the course be shut down.
“The Government’s hands are tied,” Reyes wrote. “But the Government tied the knot itself.” She called the loss of an operator “an entirely self-inflicted and self-serving injury.”
Reyes went further, finding that the Park Service ended National Links Trust’s operation of East Potomac on Nov. 15 “so that it could close the Park to effectuate President Trump’s directive to begin work on the Fazio Design immediately.”
Trump weighed in repeatedly Saturday before the ruling, publishing more than a dozen social media posts about East Potomac — some duplicates — alongside photos of the course. Though the course was busy all day, he called East Potomac “the Worst Golf Course anywhere in the World” and accused Reyes of preventing the administration from “quickly and inexpensively” fixing it. He also promised D.C.-area residents a 50 percent discount on rates at the redesigned course.
Closing the entire peninsula would impact thousands of cyclists, runners, anglers and others who use the park and picnic areas. Reyes also noted that the redesigned course might shut off access to a range of golfers who might prefer an easier, more affordable layout.
East Potomac is a 124-year-old public facility with an 18-hole course, two nine-hole courses, a driving range, practice areas and a historic miniature golf course. It recorded nearly 125,000 rounds last year, serving beginners and junior golfers, as well as regulars drawn by its low-cost access and views of the Washington Monument and Potomac River.
Reyes also found a separate problem with the way the Park Service attempted to impose the closure. National Park Service regulations require notice-and-comment rulemaking for closures that significantly alter how the public uses a park, she wrote, and the agency had not completed that process.
“Notice-and-comment rulemaking is not impracticable merely because NPS wishes to accommodate President Trump and close the Park by November 15,” Reyes wrote.
The ruling does not resolve the preservation groups’ broader lawsuit or bar the government from pursuing its proposed redesign through the required review process. Reyes has separately barred the government from cutting or damaging additional trees without court approval after crews removed hundreds of trees at East Potomac. The administration has appealed that injunction.
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