The first architect on the White House ballroom spent the weeks before he resigned telling the president that the design he wanted could not be evacuated in a fire. According to two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by The Washington Post, James McCrery II warned that the plan did not give most guests a way out through the main entrance in an emergency, that the alternative exits were “insufficient,” and that there was little to stop a kitchen fire spreading into the event space on the floor above. Trump's answer was that building codes do not apply to White House construction. “I am the code,” he said.
McCrery is not an adversary. He is a classical architect and a Catholic University professor whom Trump appointed to the Commission of Fine Arts in his first term, and when the project was announced he said he was “honored that President Trump has entrusted me to help bring this beautiful and necessary renovation to The People's House.” He withdrew in the week of October 20, 2025, the same week demolition of the East Wing began.
The documents are what lift this above a disputed recollection. A White House official's notes from a September 30, 2025 design meeting record contractor comments and “areas of concern,” with the line “Life safety — big concern.” Notes from a November 6 meeting, after McCrery was gone, read “Life safety — needs POTUS buy in.” Drawings marked in black Sharpie expand a 640-seat sketch across the full width of the second floor, scratch out proposed service corridors and cross out two sets of service stairs. One note to the architect begins, “James,” and adds, “And you think we are big.” A separate design problem in the same records: too few toilets for the maximum occupancy, with one early version giving the women's bathroom seven stalls.
The reason the argument could end this way is structural. These projects are being routed through the Executive Residence, a small office that is not a federal agency and so falls outside the rules that bind agencies, and the District of Columbia cannot enforce local building codes on federal property. The contract with Clark Construction does require work to follow “Federal, State, and local laws, regulations, codes, directives, or guidance provided by the Contracting Officer,” and the contracting officer is Joshua Fisher, the White House director of management and administration, who did not respond to the Post. Clark has hired a private firm to inspect its own work. Kevin Kampschroer, who spent 50 years at the General Services Administration overseeing federal construction, put the practical point plainly: “bottom line is, I don't know any commercial building owner that would cheat on the fire code, because the risk is too great.”
Everyone involved answered on the record, and their answers should be read alongside the account above. A White House spokesman said it would be “factually false and totally inaccurate” to say that McCrery's departure “was in any way associated with code issues,” adding that “life safety issues have been addressed and resolved continuously as the design has evolved” and that the decision was simply “to move in another direction for the second phase.” Shalom Baranes, whose firm replaced McCrery's, said after publication: “I can unequivocally state that the ballroom complex has been designed to conform to applicable national building code standards.” Clark Construction said it “consistently follow[s] applicable building codes and life safety requirements.”
McCrery himself has not confirmed any of it. He asked Post reporters who came to his office to leave and not contact him again, and his statement through a spokesman gives no reason for his departure: “President Trump entrusted me with the earliest stages of the new ballroom design. I am truly grateful for that honor … Having completed the earliest designs, I stepped aside and a new firm was engaged.” The quote at the center of this entry is therefore attributed by two anonymous sources and denied in part by the White House. What the documents independently show is that safety was flagged in writing before he left, that it was still unresolved enough to need the president's sign-off after he left, and that the Post could not determine from the records whether the problems he identified have been fixed in the current design. No other outlet has done its own reporting on this, and no right-leaning outlet has covered it at all.
For the money and the politics around the same project, see White House Ballroom Funded by $400 Million From Corporate Donors; a Judge Orders Construction to Stop, Ruling 'The President Is Not the Owner', Public Citizen: Trump's Ballroom Donors Won More Than $50 Billion in Federal Contracts in Six Months, With Lockheed Alone Getting $43.8 Billion and 30,000 Cubic Yards of East Wing Demolition Debris Were Dumped at a Public DC Golf Course; National Park Service Soil Tests Found Lead, Chromium, and Other Toxic Metals.
Correction (September 24, 2026): an earlier version of this entry said the November 6 notes came “five weeks” after McCrery left. The Post does not say that, and he withdrew in the week of October 20, a little over two weeks earlier. The reference to five weeks has been removed.