Newly released federal planning documents reveal the staggering scale of what it would take to build President Donald Trump’s proposed “Triumphal Arch” near Washington, D.C. According to a preliminary National Park Service assessment, construction of the 250-foot monument would run 20 hours a day, in two 10-hour shifts, year-round, for two to three years.
The aggressive timeline has one clear goal: finish the structure before Trump leaves office and in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. But the documents also lay bare just how massive — and disruptive — such an undertaking would be.
A Planned Timeline, Not Active Construction
It’s important to be precise about where the project actually stands. Nothing is being built yet. The 20-hour-a-day schedule is a planned timeline laid out on paper in a preliminary assessment, not a description of work currently underway. Surveying of the site only began in mid-May.
What the documents do show is an ambitious, seven-phase project mapped out in detail. The early phases alone are enormous: roughly five months of continuous heavy-equipment operation just to drive the foundation system about 75 feet down to bedrock. From there, crews would begin raising a concrete structure clad in U.S.-sourced granite, supported by cranes towering as high as 320 feet.
The Location Raises Eyebrows
Part of the controversy is where the arch would rise. The planned site is Memorial Circle on Columbia Island — the traffic circle between the Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery, directly across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial at the west end of the National Mall.
That places a potential round-the-clock industrial construction zone next to one of the nation’s most hallowed sites: the cemetery where hundreds of thousands of American service members are buried. Critics have questioned what years of 20-hour-a-day building — complete with cranes, floodlights for night work, concrete pumps and heavy excavation — would mean for the solemn character of the surrounding memorial landscape.
Already Headed to Court
The project isn’t just facing public criticism — it’s already being challenged in court. The advocacy group Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three Vietnam War veterans, arguing that the project moved forward without proper approval from Congress or the independent agencies that are supposed to sign off on monuments and memorials in the nation’s capital.
Major monuments in Washington typically go through a deliberate review process involving multiple federal commissions. The veterans and their attorneys contend that process was bypassed — a claim that could determine whether the aggressive timeline ever leaves the planning stage.
What This Means for Americans
For ordinary Americans, the questions go beyond architecture. A multi-year, 20-hour-a-day construction project on federal land carries real costs — in taxpayer dollars, in disruption to one of the most visited stretches of the capital, and in the precedent it sets for how monuments get approved. When a project of this scale advances on a deadline tied to a single administration’s calendar, the public has a stake in asking who signed off, who is paying, and whether the proper checks were followed.
For now, the arch exists as an ambitious plan on paper, a survey crew in the field, and a lawsuit in the courts. Whether it becomes a finished 250-foot monument — or a cautionary tale about process and accountability — remains to be seen.
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