Emily Badger

If the federal show of force in Washington has had a deterrent effect on crime, it appears to have deterred entirely normal aspects of city life, too. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/u...

The government knows an enormous amount about you in the data systems DOGE has sought to access. Just for starters: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/u...

DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/u...

Did you all realize that the National Mall is slightly crooked compared to the rest of D.C.'s L'Enfant street grid? The McMillan Commission did that!

Careful planning is Washington’s whole thing: symbolic sightlines; monuments that speak to one another; columns, rooflines and axes aligned just so. The whole city is supposed to be a work of civic art. Trump’s projects test this 235-year-old idea: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Tomorrow the Commission of Fine Arts will take another look at Trump's proposed arch, including renderings of it viewed from around the area. Here is its winged statue, peeping over the trees from the National Mall.

More detailed renderings now available for Trump's proposed arch: www.cfa.gov/system/files...

The East Wing demolition is now making it difficult for the government to argue in the Arch lawsuit that no injunction is needed because construction isn't imminent. Judge Chutkan just doesn’t believe it, when the president himself has said he wants the arch by July 4th.

Catching up on this thorough and thoughtful @philipkennicott.bsky.social piece on Trump's designs on the capital, until now a city of simple symmetry and unfussy architecture: www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/0...

The National Capital Planning Commission is scheduled to vote today to approve the president's ballroom. As of March, this is where the project stood. By this afternoon, it will jump to the "final" step. (NCPC is no longer showing this tracker on their website tho.)

NCPC has posted an addendum to the ballroom plans incorporating the removed stairs as the president showed Sunday night. No new renderings, detailed plans, dimensions, landscape. Just the images Trump showed. www.ncpc.gov/files/projec...

NCPC says they're still voting on the ballroom on Thursday, despite this ruling. Unclear tho, what plans they're voting on -- the ones they saw earlier this month, or the changed ones the president revealed on Air Force One on Sunday.

Federal judge rules construction must stop on the president's ballroom until Congress authorizes it: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...