For months, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes did something that has become an endangered species in federal courtrooms: she gave the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt. The case, DC Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, was filed in February by the preservation group and two regulars at the East Potomac Golf Course. That’s the public course on the Potomac that Donald Trump wants rebuilt as “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.” The plaintiffs argue that the administration’s plan to “replace the existing Golf Course with an elite championship-style course,” which it calls the Washington National Plan, violates the Administrative Procedure Act. Through months of hearings, Reyes said she had no interest in becoming the “overseer of Parks and Rec.” She repeatedly declined to enter an injunction because she trusted the government’s lawyers to warn her before anything irreversible happened.
Aw, Judge Reyes — you dear, sweet summer child! Presuming good faith of this administration is a fool’s errand.
In a 21-page memorandum opinion issued Tuesday, Reyes appears to have learned that lesson the hard way. The judge granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order. She also laid out exactly what happened while she was extending all that trust:
In five days—from Monday, October 5, 2026, to Friday, October 9, 2026—the Department of the Interior ordered, considered, and approved a plan to remove hundreds of trees from the East Potomac Golf Course. Early the next morning, the National Park Service had bulldozers on site. By day’s end, it had removed about 430 healthy, non-invasive trees.
It would have been hundreds more, but it rained. The opinion credits “the vagaries of Mother Nature—and then this Court’s equitable powers” with stopping the operation, in that order. Then Reyes summed up the government’s position in a paragraph that reads like she decided complete sentences were too generous:
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.
To see why the judge is this angry, look back at the summer. In July, plaintiffs asked for a formal notice order, and Reyes said no, explaining that she didn’t want to put anyone through contempt proceedings, “I want to trust that people are acting in good faith and have them acting in good faith until proven otherwise, and you have not proven otherwise to me in this litigation.” In September, after NPS cut down about 150 trees, the government assured her that every one was invasive, dead, dying, or hazardous, and that further removals would follow those criteria and “no other criteria.” She took them at their word again.
“The Government then did precisely what Plaintiffs feared,” Reyes wrote. Sometime that month, National Mall and Memorial Parks Superintendent Kevin Griess asked his staff for a tree management plan (“TMP”). On October 5, Interior Deputy Chief of Staff Greg Wischer told NPS Deputy Director of Operations Frank Lands to implement a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report “as soon as practical.” Acting NPS Director Jessica Bowron signed off the next day. Notice to the court and the plaintiffs arrived at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend, with removal starting the next morning.
Reyes noted the government managed plenty of speed, just not in the direction of the court, “The Government acted urgently—internally, that is. There was no comparable rush when it came to providing Plaintiffs or the Court notice of the TMP.”
So why the rush? Here’s what the man running the project told her under oath at Monday’s emergency hearing:
THE COURT: Is there any urgency of continuing with the tree removal?
GRIESS: Not that I’m aware of, Your Honor.
THE COURT: So the trees could be cut down tomorrow, or they could be cut down a month from now, and from the government’s perspective, it’s basically the same?
GRIESS: From what I understand, Your Honor, yes.
Griess’s written declaration had said the work started in October because NPS “now received” new budgetary resources. On the stand, he walked that back. There was no new money, and he could have submitted the plan at any time. The 2019 report covers all three of D.C.’s public golf courses and much more than trees. The government implemented exactly one part of it, at exactly one course: tree removal at the course the president toured in June, when he announced on Truth Social that work “will go quickly” and “will begin on September 1st.”
Reyes was not buying it:
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.
Her conclusion: 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.”
The environmental review fared no better. NPS skipped both an environmental impact statement and an environmental assessment and relied on a categorical exclusion form signed the day before the chainsaws came out. That form estimated 169 trees in the first zone, and crews took down roughly 200 more than that. Griess blamed the dense, skinny trees. Reyes offered another theory: “Perhaps. Or perhaps the oversight occurred because the agency’s NEPA compliance efforts lasted mere days.” She pointed out that a similar project at Rock Creek Golf Course in 2023 came with a 250-plus-page environmental assessment and six months of analysis. “Presumably that assessment of the forest did not miss half its trees.”
Ouch.
There’s even a Lorax footnote. Reyes recounts that Dr. Seuss spent a year agonizing over the character before writing the whole book in one afternoon on safari, then adds: “The Court has seen no elephants. And it has certainly had less than a year to write. But it very much appreciates that her clerks know something of late-night work and industrious afternoons.” That’s a judge who turned around a 21-page opinion on a deadline the government manufactured, and wants you to know it.
The written opinion is the polite version. At Monday’s hearing, Reyes told the government that “what has happened has cost the government all of its credibility with me in this case.” When Marissa Piropato, deputy chief in DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, insisted the government “did our best,” Reyes shot back: “Oh, you did not do your best. You did your absolute worst.” She promised that if her stop-work order was “violated by two seconds, there are going to be contempt proceedings.” Wischer and Bowron have now been ordered to appear and testify on October 19.
The TRO runs through Monday, October 26, and plaintiffs have to post a bond of $1.00. That’s roughly what the government’s representations are worth in Reyes’s courtroom at this point.
Reyes now joins the long and growing list of judges who extended this administration the presumption of regularity and got burned. Earlier this week, Judge Jennifer Rochon watched the government blow through her order on Trump propaganda ads because nobody checked their email. Judge Arun Subramanian told DOJ that these things are starting to pile up. Chief Judge James Boasberg found probable cause for criminal contempt after DOJ’s Drew Ensign told him deportation flights weren’t taking off when they absolutely were. The presumption that the government acts in good faith was once a load-bearing pillar of federal litigation, and this DOJ has spent it down to nothing in well under two years.
At Monday’s hearing, Reyes said law students regularly ask her whether the government is acting in good faith, and that she has always answered yes, that she trusts government lawyers and not one has violated her orders. The next time a law student asks, she’s going to need a new answer, and she’ll have plenty of colleagues who can help her workshop it.
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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
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