Submitted by Mary Christine
Yeah, she’s a lib and it’s cute that she thinks CONgress or Democrat control would stop this. Oh, sure, just like Biden exposed the Plandemic and didn’t mandate the shot. That said, her research is quite well done and she gives you the choice to watch her video or read her summary of the video.
My 2 cents: This would be the way they would make sure you are getting all of your vaccines and taking your meds. If you aren’t then your bank account is frozen.
Whatever they are building under that ballroom, it’s certainly not for our safety.
Via The Drey Dossier
The Medical Center Under Trump’s Ballroom by The Drey Dossier
Read on Substack
On Friday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Trump exactly what his ballroom project needed, more time to become too finished to stop.
In a one-sentence order, Roberts temporarily kept Judge Richard Leon’s injunction from taking effect, allowing construction at the White House to continue while the Supreme Court considers whether to grant the administration a longer stay. The order does not decide whether Trump had authority to demolish the East Wing, whether Congress needed to approve the ballroom, or whether the National Trust for Historic Preservation had the right to sue. It keeps the workers moving while the justices decide which of those questions they feel like answering.
For a project the government says is already 65 percent complete, with approximately 250 people working twenty hours a day, seven days a week, “for now” is an enormous amount of time. Every hour produces another piece of the argument that the building has gone too far to stop. The National Trust has accused the administration of trying to outrun judicial review, which is the cleanest description anyone has given this project. The ballroom does not need the Supreme Court to decide that Trump is right today. It needs the Court to deliberate slowly enough for the construction crew to finish.
It is a tale as old as demolition. Tear down the building first, pour the concrete second, spend months litigating whether anyone had permission, and arrive at the final hearing with a structure the government insists would be ruinously expensive to remove. By the time the clock runs out, the thing the courts were supposed to review is already standing there, surrounded by hard hats and sunk costs, asking what exactly everyone expects to do about it now.
To understand what Roberts has allowed Trump to keep building, you have to begin one day before anyone knew there would be a ballroom.
This work is completely independent, so I am completely grateful if you can support it by subscribing!
On July 31, 2025, Karoline Leavitt walked into the White House briefing room and announced that Trump planned to build a privately funded, 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the East Wing stood. That is the day every article, lawsuit, and argument about the project begins. The announcement came with a price, a donor story, a construction schedule, and a promise that taxpayers would not be paying for any of it.
Almost nobody went back twenty-four hours.
The day before Leavitt’s announcement, the East Room filled with representatives from more than sixty healthcare and technology companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Epic, OpenAI and Anthropic. They had come to launch a national system for moving Americans’ medical information through private applications, identity services, electronic health networks and artificial intelligence.
The officials onstage were remarkably open about how they intended to move so quickly. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Temu’s favorite doctor and now somehow the man running Medicare and Medicaid, explained that the companies were making pledges instead of following new laws. Pledges, he said, were “nimble” and “fast.”
Amy Gleason was at the time serving as acting administrator of DOGE, because of course she was. For some reason every trail through the federal government now seems to end at the same damp wall.
And can I just say, DOGE has become the black mold of the executive branch. Elon Musk flooded the building, tore open the drywall, and wandered away, while the thing he left behind continued blooming in the dark, feeding on whatever federal data happened to be stored nearby. Every attempt to contain it seems to drive it deeper into the structure, where it changes names, acquires another acting administrator, and reappears somewhere nobody remembers authorizing it to enter. You can paint over the stain and announce that the cleanup is complete, but the spores are already moving through the ventilation. Open a wall anywhere in Washington and there it is again, soft and dark and alive.
Behind this particular wall in Washington was Amy Gleason, describing the new health technology project as a “voluntary alignment” and emphasizing that there would be no regulation or rulemaking, which is exactly the kind of warm, unventilated environment where black mold tends to do its best work.
Regulation takes time because it forces an agency to establish the rules before a system begins operating. It gives the public a chance to object, assigns responsibility when something goes wrong, and leaves behind a record that Congress and the courts can examine. CMS chose speed. It published an Interoperability Framework and invited private companies to establish the architecture while the protections remained unwritten.
Then Trump stood up and made a remarkably specific promise.
Sir, I was not especially concerned about a national health database until you announced that you were the least concerned person in America about a national health database.
If you have developed even a modest instinct for self-preservation, the moment this president names the exact thing everyone is supposedly worried about and assures you that he personally does not worry about it is usually the moment to lean in. So I leaned in, and the first piece of infrastructure I found was already calling itself the national source of truth.
CMS calls it the National Directory of Healthcare Providers and Services, which is a soothing name for a system designed to receive information, store it, verify it, update it, and make it retrievable through an API. An older workflow page in the HL7 code repository called it a “Network Data Hub.” The current technical guide calls it a “national source of truth.”
The distinction between a directory and a database matters less than the verbs. This thing collects, compares, remembers, and answers. It is a database with very good public relations. There are perfectly reasonable reasons to build one. Provider directories are a mess, doctors waste enormous amounts of time correcting administrative records, and patients routinely discover that the physician listed as accepting their insurance retired three years ago and may now be living peacefully beside a lake. A national directory could make healthcare considerably less maddening.
A national source of truth can also become a national choke point. Once every hospital, insurer, record exchange, and approved application relies on the same system, whoever controls that system can influence which providers are recognized, which electronic endpoints are trusted, and where a patient’s request for information travels.
An administration interested in tracking abortion care would not need to seize the databases of every hospital in America. It could route requests involving reproductive health clinics through an endpoint under its control, collect the verified identity attached to each request, and remove providers from the trusted network. The applications and insurers downstream would import the decision because they had already agreed to trust the source. One change at the center becomes reality everywhere else.
CMS is allowing private companies to establish this architecture before public rules determine who may search it, who may alter it, and what happens to the information that passes through. Once American healthcare depends on the system, the difficulty of removing it becomes the argument for leaving it alone. This was the project under discussion in the East Room on July 30. Trump looked around at the representatives from Apple, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Epic, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the other companies being invited into the national health ecosystem, considered the amount of money sitting in front of him, and said something that has aged remarkably well.
When Trump sees a room full of billionaires, you expect him to start thinking about tax cuts. Instead, he started thinking about fortifications.
Nobody in the room had yet heard about the hardened communications, medical facilities, drone protection, or classified construction that would soon be described beneath the East Wing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. followed Trump, announced that his next comment had nothing to do with healthcare, and invoked Jacqueline Kennedy while praising Trump’s transformation of the White House.
Twenty-four hours later, Karoline Leavitt announced the ballroom.
Leavitt introduced the project as “one other announcement,” as though someone had nearly allowed her to leave the podium without mentioning that the president intended to demolish an entire wing of the White House. The ballroom would cost approximately $200 million, seat 650 people, and be paid for by Trump and private donors.
When a reporter asked how much of the East Wing would be torn down, Leavitt said the building would be “modernized” and its occupants temporarily relocated. Their furniture eventually took the express route through the windows. Eighty-one days later, the entire wing was gone. The private money functioned as an accelerator. Without an appropriations request, there was no spending bill or budget hearing where somebody could demand the plans before the demolition began. The estimate climbed from $200 million to $400 million while anonymous donors wrote checks and the White House retained a role in selecting them.
By the time the review process caught up, there was almost nothing left to review. The first lawsuit arrived after the East Wing was down. Trump fired the Commission of Fine Arts, leaving one of the primary review bodies unable to meet, while his original architect disappeared from a project that had begun growing beyond the size he designed.
For six weeks, the largest White House construction project in seventy years had no publicly identified lead architect and no functioning arts commission. The people assigned to design the building were gone, the people assigned to review it were gone, and the excavators were doing great. The National Trust for Historic Preservation eventually filed the challenge that mattered. Judge Richard Leon allowed underground construction to continue after reviewing classified declarations about the security work beneath the site, though he asked Trump’s lawyers one question that would come to define the case.
If they kept pouring concrete underground, would that work eventually dictate the size and shape of the ballroom above it?
Trump’s lawyers said no. The design remained fluid, they told him, and nothing happening below would lock the administration into a particular structure above. That promise bought them the excavation.
Trump then spent the spring breaking it in public.
After Leon ruled that the government had failed to identify any law authorizing the ballroom without Congress, Trump announced that the ballroom was actually a shed over a massive military complex. Each legal defeat added another security feature. The project acquired hardened communications, missile-resistant steel, blastproof glass, drone-proof ceilings, drone-proof roofs, and enough defensive architecture to make one wonder what kind of state dinner they were expecting. Trump seemed to be listing every noun he associated with construction and hoping that, somewhere around “beams,” the ballroom would become a military necessity. Underneath the architectural Mad Libs was a fairly significant admission. The project includes “a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities.”
Congress was not buying the national-security-ballroom bullshit, so Trump continued making the project sound more urgent, more classified, more military, and somehow more structurally structured. The ballroom could no longer merely have a roof. It needed protection from drones outside the building and, apparently, any drones already inside the ballroom. The more scrutiny the project received, the more elaborate the claims became, and every attempt to establish the ballroom as a military necessity revealed a little more about the facility it was designed to protect.
By May, Trump had become his own hostile witness. Walking reporters through the construction site, he explained that the heating, air conditioning, elevators, drone capacity, shield, roof, and lower floors were “all knit in.” Without the building above, he said, they could not construct what was below. That admission did more work than hundreds of pages of legal filings. The underground project had dictated the ballroom, which was the exact condition his lawyers had assured Leon would never exist.
Leon’s injunction was supposed to halt most above-ground construction while allowing security work underground to continue. The D.C. Circuit upheld it, then paused its own ruling for fourteen days so the administration could reach the Supreme Court.
Trump’s argument had changed again. His lawyers described the ballroom as part of an “integrated military complex” required by national security and asked the Court to rule that the National Trust never had standing to challenge it. The administration was now relying on the integration it had previously assured Leon did not exist.
On Friday, the injunction was finally supposed to take effect. Chief Justice John Roberts stopped it with a one-sentence administrative stay.
An administrative stay is meant to preserve the status quo while the Court decides what to do next, but a construction site running twenty hours a day has no stable status quo. The building Roberts allowed to continue on Friday will be a different building by the time the justices return to the case.
The government says the project is already 65 percent complete and describes parts of it as virtually impossible to remove. That is the strategy. Every day produces more concrete, more sunk cost, and another reason for a future court to throw up its hands and leave the structure where it is.
The administration has not persuaded the Supreme Court that Trump had authority to build the ballroom. It has persuaded the Chief Justice to let the building keep creating its own defense.
The case may ultimately turn on Alison Hoagland, an architectural historian who walks past the White House about once a month and believes the ballroom will damage her professional, historical, and aesthetic interests. The administration calls her a “strolling passerby” complaining about a building she has not yet seen, which is rich coming from the people requiring the entire country to imagine what they are constructing underground.
If the Court decides Hoagland and the National Trust lacked standing, the lower-court rulings can disappear before any court answers the underlying question. Trump does not have to establish that he possessed the authority to demolish the East Wing. He only has to establish that these particular people had no right to ask.
The same logic runs through the health system announced one day before the ballroom. The NDH determines which providers and endpoints are recognized as legitimate. The standing argument determines which challengers are recognized as legitimate. Whoever controls the gate can make the underlying dispute disappear without resolving it.
While the ballroom was hardening into concrete, the healthcare architecture was moving in the opposite direction, away from public view.
I started watching the National Provider Directory’s GitHub repository because public code has a useful habit of recording what press releases leave out. On December 16, CMS transferred the cloud permissions used to create and modify the directory’s infrastructure to a repository called npd-ops. On December 31, it removed 3,523 lines of infrastructure code from the public repository.
The deleted files defined the production database, networking, record migrations, FHIR API, and the diagram showing how everything connected. CMS said the material had moved to npd-ops.
That repository is private.
The public record now gives us two architectures advancing at the same time. CMS and its technology partners are creating a national health-data system built around verified identities, trusted endpoints, and AI applications. The administration is constructing a hardened computing facility inside the White House perimeter, complete with medical facilities, classified systems, and an above-ground building Trump says is necessary for the lower floors to function. The record stops before showing where those systems meet. The missing code may contain part of the answer.
The question Congress needs to ask is no longer abstract. It has a repository name, a construction site, a set of plans, and a room full of people who can be placed under oath.
The Supreme Court stayed Leon’s order. It did not stay Congress.
While the justices deliberate, Congress can still force the records into daylight. Here is what it should do now.
1. Preserve npd-ops before anything else disappears.
Senate Finance should send CMS an immediate preservation demand covering the complete npd-ops repository, including its version history, deployment logs, cloud permissions, vendor integrations, and access records. The demand should also cover every message explaining why CMS removed 3,523 lines of infrastructure code from public view and where that material went afterward.
2. Put Mehmet Oz and Amy Gleason under oath.
House Energy and Commerce should hold a public hearing and ask them who controls the national source of truth, which records it can reach, who can initiate a query, and whether the computing facility beneath the White House will be capable of accessing or analyzing information moving through it. They called this a voluntary alignment because they wanted speed. Congress should make them explain what they aligned before the rules existed.
3. Determine whether the facility is the junction connecting these systems.
Congress should require the administration to produce a complete data-flow map showing which federal systems the facility beneath the White House will be able to reach, which private companies will operate inside it, and whether it can connect health records, verified identities, exchange networks, artificial intelligence tools, and classified systems inside one computing environment.
Congress knows how to follow money, demand plans, and compel testimony. What it may not know is that the national health architecture moved into a private repository while a classified medical and computing facility was being poured beneath the White House. It needs to investigate those projects together and determine whether the facility is being built as the place where separate federal databases can finally talk to one another. Every day the Supreme Court waits is another day the administration gets to harden that possibility into concrete. Trump wants the building to outrun the law. Congress can make sure it never outruns the questions.
The Supreme Court may take months deciding whether the National Trust had Article III standing. Congress does not need Article III standing to investigate the executive branch, compel testimony, or control federal spending. It has the authority, the money, and a rapidly disappearing window in which either will matter.
The administration is building every day. Congress should be coming for the receipts every day, too.
Continue reading...
[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
Yeah, she’s a lib and it’s cute that she thinks CONgress or Democrat control would stop this. Oh, sure, just like Biden exposed the Plandemic and didn’t mandate the shot. That said, her research is quite well done and she gives you the choice to watch her video or read her summary of the video.
My 2 cents: This would be the way they would make sure you are getting all of your vaccines and taking your meds. If you aren’t then your bank account is frozen.
Whatever they are building under that ballroom, it’s certainly not for our safety.
Via The Drey Dossier
The Medical Center Under Trump’s Ballroom by The Drey Dossier
Read on Substack
On Friday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Trump exactly what his ballroom project needed, more time to become too finished to stop.
In a one-sentence order, Roberts temporarily kept Judge Richard Leon’s injunction from taking effect, allowing construction at the White House to continue while the Supreme Court considers whether to grant the administration a longer stay. The order does not decide whether Trump had authority to demolish the East Wing, whether Congress needed to approve the ballroom, or whether the National Trust for Historic Preservation had the right to sue. It keeps the workers moving while the justices decide which of those questions they feel like answering.
For a project the government says is already 65 percent complete, with approximately 250 people working twenty hours a day, seven days a week, “for now” is an enormous amount of time. Every hour produces another piece of the argument that the building has gone too far to stop. The National Trust has accused the administration of trying to outrun judicial review, which is the cleanest description anyone has given this project. The ballroom does not need the Supreme Court to decide that Trump is right today. It needs the Court to deliberate slowly enough for the construction crew to finish.
It is a tale as old as demolition. Tear down the building first, pour the concrete second, spend months litigating whether anyone had permission, and arrive at the final hearing with a structure the government insists would be ruinously expensive to remove. By the time the clock runs out, the thing the courts were supposed to review is already standing there, surrounded by hard hats and sunk costs, asking what exactly everyone expects to do about it now.
To understand what Roberts has allowed Trump to keep building, you have to begin one day before anyone knew there would be a ballroom.
This work is completely independent, so I am completely grateful if you can support it by subscribing!
On July 31, 2025, Karoline Leavitt walked into the White House briefing room and announced that Trump planned to build a privately funded, 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the East Wing stood. That is the day every article, lawsuit, and argument about the project begins. The announcement came with a price, a donor story, a construction schedule, and a promise that taxpayers would not be paying for any of it.
Almost nobody went back twenty-four hours.
The day before Leavitt’s announcement, the East Room filled with representatives from more than sixty healthcare and technology companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Epic, OpenAI and Anthropic. They had come to launch a national system for moving Americans’ medical information through private applications, identity services, electronic health networks and artificial intelligence.
The officials onstage were remarkably open about how they intended to move so quickly. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Temu’s favorite doctor and now somehow the man running Medicare and Medicaid, explained that the companies were making pledges instead of following new laws. Pledges, he said, were “nimble” and “fast.”
Amy Gleason was at the time serving as acting administrator of DOGE, because of course she was. For some reason every trail through the federal government now seems to end at the same damp wall.
And can I just say, DOGE has become the black mold of the executive branch. Elon Musk flooded the building, tore open the drywall, and wandered away, while the thing he left behind continued blooming in the dark, feeding on whatever federal data happened to be stored nearby. Every attempt to contain it seems to drive it deeper into the structure, where it changes names, acquires another acting administrator, and reappears somewhere nobody remembers authorizing it to enter. You can paint over the stain and announce that the cleanup is complete, but the spores are already moving through the ventilation. Open a wall anywhere in Washington and there it is again, soft and dark and alive.
Behind this particular wall in Washington was Amy Gleason, describing the new health technology project as a “voluntary alignment” and emphasizing that there would be no regulation or rulemaking, which is exactly the kind of warm, unventilated environment where black mold tends to do its best work.
Regulation takes time because it forces an agency to establish the rules before a system begins operating. It gives the public a chance to object, assigns responsibility when something goes wrong, and leaves behind a record that Congress and the courts can examine. CMS chose speed. It published an Interoperability Framework and invited private companies to establish the architecture while the protections remained unwritten.
Then Trump stood up and made a remarkably specific promise.
Sir, I was not especially concerned about a national health database until you announced that you were the least concerned person in America about a national health database.
If you have developed even a modest instinct for self-preservation, the moment this president names the exact thing everyone is supposedly worried about and assures you that he personally does not worry about it is usually the moment to lean in. So I leaned in, and the first piece of infrastructure I found was already calling itself the national source of truth.
The Source of Truth
CMS calls it the National Directory of Healthcare Providers and Services, which is a soothing name for a system designed to receive information, store it, verify it, update it, and make it retrievable through an API. An older workflow page in the HL7 code repository called it a “Network Data Hub.” The current technical guide calls it a “national source of truth.”
The distinction between a directory and a database matters less than the verbs. This thing collects, compares, remembers, and answers. It is a database with very good public relations. There are perfectly reasonable reasons to build one. Provider directories are a mess, doctors waste enormous amounts of time correcting administrative records, and patients routinely discover that the physician listed as accepting their insurance retired three years ago and may now be living peacefully beside a lake. A national directory could make healthcare considerably less maddening.
A national source of truth can also become a national choke point. Once every hospital, insurer, record exchange, and approved application relies on the same system, whoever controls that system can influence which providers are recognized, which electronic endpoints are trusted, and where a patient’s request for information travels.
An administration interested in tracking abortion care would not need to seize the databases of every hospital in America. It could route requests involving reproductive health clinics through an endpoint under its control, collect the verified identity attached to each request, and remove providers from the trusted network. The applications and insurers downstream would import the decision because they had already agreed to trust the source. One change at the center becomes reality everywhere else.
CMS is allowing private companies to establish this architecture before public rules determine who may search it, who may alter it, and what happens to the information that passes through. Once American healthcare depends on the system, the difficulty of removing it becomes the argument for leaving it alone. This was the project under discussion in the East Room on July 30. Trump looked around at the representatives from Apple, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Epic, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the other companies being invited into the national health ecosystem, considered the amount of money sitting in front of him, and said something that has aged remarkably well.
When Trump sees a room full of billionaires, you expect him to start thinking about tax cuts. Instead, he started thinking about fortifications.
Nobody in the room had yet heard about the hardened communications, medical facilities, drone protection, or classified construction that would soon be described beneath the East Wing. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. followed Trump, announced that his next comment had nothing to do with healthcare, and invoked Jacqueline Kennedy while praising Trump’s transformation of the White House.
Twenty-four hours later, Karoline Leavitt announced the ballroom.
The Building
Leavitt introduced the project as “one other announcement,” as though someone had nearly allowed her to leave the podium without mentioning that the president intended to demolish an entire wing of the White House. The ballroom would cost approximately $200 million, seat 650 people, and be paid for by Trump and private donors.
When a reporter asked how much of the East Wing would be torn down, Leavitt said the building would be “modernized” and its occupants temporarily relocated. Their furniture eventually took the express route through the windows. Eighty-one days later, the entire wing was gone. The private money functioned as an accelerator. Without an appropriations request, there was no spending bill or budget hearing where somebody could demand the plans before the demolition began. The estimate climbed from $200 million to $400 million while anonymous donors wrote checks and the White House retained a role in selecting them.
By the time the review process caught up, there was almost nothing left to review. The first lawsuit arrived after the East Wing was down. Trump fired the Commission of Fine Arts, leaving one of the primary review bodies unable to meet, while his original architect disappeared from a project that had begun growing beyond the size he designed.
For six weeks, the largest White House construction project in seventy years had no publicly identified lead architect and no functioning arts commission. The people assigned to design the building were gone, the people assigned to review it were gone, and the excavators were doing great. The National Trust for Historic Preservation eventually filed the challenge that mattered. Judge Richard Leon allowed underground construction to continue after reviewing classified declarations about the security work beneath the site, though he asked Trump’s lawyers one question that would come to define the case.
If they kept pouring concrete underground, would that work eventually dictate the size and shape of the ballroom above it?
Trump’s lawyers said no. The design remained fluid, they told him, and nothing happening below would lock the administration into a particular structure above. That promise bought them the excavation.
Trump then spent the spring breaking it in public.
After Leon ruled that the government had failed to identify any law authorizing the ballroom without Congress, Trump announced that the ballroom was actually a shed over a massive military complex. Each legal defeat added another security feature. The project acquired hardened communications, missile-resistant steel, blastproof glass, drone-proof ceilings, drone-proof roofs, and enough defensive architecture to make one wonder what kind of state dinner they were expecting. Trump seemed to be listing every noun he associated with construction and hoping that, somewhere around “beams,” the ballroom would become a military necessity. Underneath the architectural Mad Libs was a fairly significant admission. The project includes “a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities.”
Congress was not buying the national-security-ballroom bullshit, so Trump continued making the project sound more urgent, more classified, more military, and somehow more structurally structured. The ballroom could no longer merely have a roof. It needed protection from drones outside the building and, apparently, any drones already inside the ballroom. The more scrutiny the project received, the more elaborate the claims became, and every attempt to establish the ballroom as a military necessity revealed a little more about the facility it was designed to protect.
By May, Trump had become his own hostile witness. Walking reporters through the construction site, he explained that the heating, air conditioning, elevators, drone capacity, shield, roof, and lower floors were “all knit in.” Without the building above, he said, they could not construct what was below. That admission did more work than hundreds of pages of legal filings. The underground project had dictated the ballroom, which was the exact condition his lawyers had assured Leon would never exist.
The Clock
Leon’s injunction was supposed to halt most above-ground construction while allowing security work underground to continue. The D.C. Circuit upheld it, then paused its own ruling for fourteen days so the administration could reach the Supreme Court.
Trump’s argument had changed again. His lawyers described the ballroom as part of an “integrated military complex” required by national security and asked the Court to rule that the National Trust never had standing to challenge it. The administration was now relying on the integration it had previously assured Leon did not exist.
On Friday, the injunction was finally supposed to take effect. Chief Justice John Roberts stopped it with a one-sentence administrative stay.
An administrative stay is meant to preserve the status quo while the Court decides what to do next, but a construction site running twenty hours a day has no stable status quo. The building Roberts allowed to continue on Friday will be a different building by the time the justices return to the case.
The government says the project is already 65 percent complete and describes parts of it as virtually impossible to remove. That is the strategy. Every day produces more concrete, more sunk cost, and another reason for a future court to throw up its hands and leave the structure where it is.
The administration has not persuaded the Supreme Court that Trump had authority to build the ballroom. It has persuaded the Chief Justice to let the building keep creating its own defense.
The case may ultimately turn on Alison Hoagland, an architectural historian who walks past the White House about once a month and believes the ballroom will damage her professional, historical, and aesthetic interests. The administration calls her a “strolling passerby” complaining about a building she has not yet seen, which is rich coming from the people requiring the entire country to imagine what they are constructing underground.
If the Court decides Hoagland and the National Trust lacked standing, the lower-court rulings can disappear before any court answers the underlying question. Trump does not have to establish that he possessed the authority to demolish the East Wing. He only has to establish that these particular people had no right to ask.
The same logic runs through the health system announced one day before the ballroom. The NDH determines which providers and endpoints are recognized as legitimate. The standing argument determines which challengers are recognized as legitimate. Whoever controls the gate can make the underlying dispute disappear without resolving it.
The Code Goes Dark
While the ballroom was hardening into concrete, the healthcare architecture was moving in the opposite direction, away from public view.
I started watching the National Provider Directory’s GitHub repository because public code has a useful habit of recording what press releases leave out. On December 16, CMS transferred the cloud permissions used to create and modify the directory’s infrastructure to a repository called npd-ops. On December 31, it removed 3,523 lines of infrastructure code from the public repository.
The deleted files defined the production database, networking, record migrations, FHIR API, and the diagram showing how everything connected. CMS said the material had moved to npd-ops.
That repository is private.
The public record now gives us two architectures advancing at the same time. CMS and its technology partners are creating a national health-data system built around verified identities, trusted endpoints, and AI applications. The administration is constructing a hardened computing facility inside the White House perimeter, complete with medical facilities, classified systems, and an above-ground building Trump says is necessary for the lower floors to function. The record stops before showing where those systems meet. The missing code may contain part of the answer.
The question Congress needs to ask is no longer abstract. It has a repository name, a construction site, a set of plans, and a room full of people who can be placed under oath.
Congress Can Still Act
The Supreme Court stayed Leon’s order. It did not stay Congress.
While the justices deliberate, Congress can still force the records into daylight. Here is what it should do now.
1. Preserve npd-ops before anything else disappears.
Senate Finance should send CMS an immediate preservation demand covering the complete npd-ops repository, including its version history, deployment logs, cloud permissions, vendor integrations, and access records. The demand should also cover every message explaining why CMS removed 3,523 lines of infrastructure code from public view and where that material went afterward.
2. Put Mehmet Oz and Amy Gleason under oath.
House Energy and Commerce should hold a public hearing and ask them who controls the national source of truth, which records it can reach, who can initiate a query, and whether the computing facility beneath the White House will be capable of accessing or analyzing information moving through it. They called this a voluntary alignment because they wanted speed. Congress should make them explain what they aligned before the rules existed.
3. Determine whether the facility is the junction connecting these systems.
Congress should require the administration to produce a complete data-flow map showing which federal systems the facility beneath the White House will be able to reach, which private companies will operate inside it, and whether it can connect health records, verified identities, exchange networks, artificial intelligence tools, and classified systems inside one computing environment.
Congress knows how to follow money, demand plans, and compel testimony. What it may not know is that the national health architecture moved into a private repository while a classified medical and computing facility was being poured beneath the White House. It needs to investigate those projects together and determine whether the facility is being built as the place where separate federal databases can finally talk to one another. Every day the Supreme Court waits is another day the administration gets to harden that possibility into concrete. Trump wants the building to outrun the law. Congress can make sure it never outruns the questions.
The Supreme Court may take months deciding whether the National Trust had Article III standing. Congress does not need Article III standing to investigate the executive branch, compel testimony, or control federal spending. It has the authority, the money, and a rapidly disappearing window in which either will matter.
The administration is building every day. Congress should be coming for the receipts every day, too.
SOURCES CITED
Court Filings and Rulings
- National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation — Administrative Stay — Supreme Court of the United States, August 21, 2026
- National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service — Opinion — U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, August 7, 2026
- National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation — Application for a Stay of the Injunction — Office of the Solicitor General, August 14, 2026
Government Sources
- Remarks on Health Technology Improvement Efforts — The American Presidency Project, July 30, 2025
- The White House Announces White House Ballroom Construction to Begin — The White House, July 31, 2025
- Qualified Health Plan Directory Pilot Privacy Impact Assessment — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, February 18, 2026
Technical and Architectural Records
- Update Trust Policy to Read From npd-ops Rather Than NPD and Remove Infrastructure Definitions — CMS Enterprise, GitHub, December 16 and December 31, 2025
- White House Complex, East Wing Modernization and Ballroom Addition — U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, February 19, 2026
- President Trump Walks Reporters Through White House Ballroom Construction — U.S. Senate Democrats, May 19, 2026
Reporting
- Trump Said No Taxpayer Money Would Be Spent on the Ballroom. A Contractor’s Invoices Show Otherwise — The Washington Post, June 16, 2026
Continue reading...
[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
