Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, announced plans to start work on the site of the 250-foot-tall triumphal arch. Final approval of the project is still pending.
Page B1From§Eachthe early evening edition — 3 September 2026
Interior begins building 250-foot triumphal arch it does not yet have legal permission to build.
As it ran on the front
Prior-approval, the plain administrative habit of finishing the paperwork before the digging starts, died this week at Memorial Circle. It was two weeks ahead of its own schedule when it went.
It was born, in the way most such customs are born, out of nothing more dramatic than order: a 250-foot arch in front of Arlington National Cemetery clears its permits before a bulldozer clears its ground. That was the whole of it. It did not live to see either happen.…
…(cont) Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that excavation on the Great Triumphal Arch would begin within two weeks. He noted, with evident pleasure, that the wait had already run past a century — 125 years, he said, over. A lawsuit challenging the project's authorization was, at the moment he said it, still open in federal court. The department's own final approval of the project was, at that same moment, still pending. Both of those facts remained true after he finished speaking. Neither one moved the two-week clock.
The New York Times filed its version plainly: Trump to break ground on arch before getting approval. Fox News filed the same day, calling it a legal battle. Between those two headlines sits the arch itself, 250 feet of triumphal statement rising above a military cemetery, cleared for construction by a press announcement rather than by a judge or a permit officer.
There is an old, flat word for proceeding as if a question has already been answered when it has not, and the word is malarkey, said the way this desk says it about a rule and not a man. It is a small fact, and it is a shit way to run a government, but the excavators do not know that; they only know the two weeks Burgum gave them.
Prior-approval is survived by the lawsuit it was supposed to have settled first, still open. It is survived, too, by the final approval it was supposed to have secured first, still pending. It leaves behind no children, having never been permitted to reproduce itself as precedent.
In lieu of flowers, read the final approval when it is finally issued, and check its date against the date already stamped on the excavation contract.
“They dug the hole before the judge even ruled on whether they're allowed to dig the hole — that's not confidence, that's a bet that nobody tears out a 250-foot arch once the concrete's poured. Sunk cost as legal strategy: get the hole deep enough and the lawsuit becomes the thing that sounds unreasonable. Same government that can't find money for anything you'd actually use finds it for this, fast, before the paperwork's even signed.”
“Look, the man said 125 years — 125! — you're going to tell people to wait on top of that for a court date? Timing is a management call, not a legal one, and the excavation and the lawsuit are two completely separate tracks running in parallel, which, sure, isn't exactly how permitting is supposed to work, but — did I say that? That's not the talking point.”
The receipts
The Trump administration will begin preparing the Memorial Circle in front of the Arlington National Cemetery for President Donald Trump’s “Great Triumphal Arch” in the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday. “We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start…
Doug Burgum announced the start of excavation on the 250-foot Great Triumphal Arch in Washington, D.C., but a lawsuit challenges the project's authorization.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.