The office will not build any of the 41 projects. It has taken the review obligation and left the work with the agencies that were already doing it.
WASHINGTON—Citing an interagency instrument it described as routine, the White House Office of Administration confirmed Tuesday that 41 federal construction projects have come onto its books by preservation review transfer since January, none of which it intends to build.
The mechanism is the one the office is defending in federal court. On January 29 the General Services Administration and the Office of Administration signed a memorandum moving the Eisenhower Executive Office Building painting project out of GSA. Because the office sits inside the Executive Office of the President, the government argues, the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act no longer reach it. Preservationists went back to court on July 30 to stop the White House from painting test panels on the 138-year-old granite while that question is pending.
“The building still gets painted. The dam still gets poured. What moves is which office the file sits in, and the statute keys on the office,” said an official in the Office of Administration who was not authorized to describe the transfer process. “Congress wrote it that way. We read it that way.”
What the Preservation Review Transfer Instrument Does
The instrument runs one page. Form OA-106 asks for the project name, the appropriating statute, the estimated cost, the reviewing agency being relieved, and seven other fields. It carries a single signature block, and that block belongs to the transferring agency. Nothing on the form asks whether the Office of Administration can perform the work, and Barbara Ochsendorf, 61, the office’s assistant director for interagency instruments, said nobody has raised the question in six months.
“A transfer of jurisdiction moves a paragraph, and people hear shovels,” Ochsendorf said. “The Bureau of Reclamation still owns the concrete. We own the sentence that would have required a hearing about it.”
The 41 Projects Now Filed Under the White House
A list the office provided runs nine pages. It includes a fish passage on the Clearwater River in Idaho, 4,000 feet of levee outside Cape Girardeau, a Coast Guard fuel pier at Ketchikan, a heating plant at a veterans hospital in Leavenworth, and the replacement of 2,300 feet of sidewalk at a federal courthouse in Tulsa. Thirty-one of the 41 sit on or beside property listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ochsendorf said the office owns no construction equipment and has assigned no engineer to any of them.
An official at one of the transferring agencies, who was not authorized to discuss the arrangement, said the preservation review transfer paperwork took under an hour. “We had eleven months of consultation ahead of us and a hearing on the calendar,” the official said. “Now we have a memo, and the memo is the consultation.”
What the Eisenhower Building Case Turns On Now
President Trump announced the paint plan in a Fox News interview on November 12, 2025, calling the building ugly and its gray granite “a really bad color.” Cultural Heritage Partners and the DC Preservation League sued 48 hours later. The administration has since proposed painting either the whole facade or the upper levels alone, using a mineral silicate coating the president has described as a magic paint. A White House official put the cost at a minimum of $7.5 million before the National Capital Planning Commission in the spring. Commission of Fine Arts members, who reviewed the design separately, are appointed by the president.
The renewed motion filed on July 30 asks U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, to halt four two-by-two-foot test panels and the extraction of up to ten core samples from the facade. “The President’s personal aesthetic preferences do not outweigh congressionally mandated procedures,” the filing states. Friedrich has not ruled. Newswax reported this month on what the pressure on federal judges is costing the bench.
Where the Preservation Review Transfer Goes Next
Ochsendorf said 340 requests are pending and that most should clear by October. Nine concern projects already in consultation. The office ruled in April that a review may move at any stage, including after a hearing has been noticed and the notices mailed, because the notice binds the agency that issued it.
Requests are processed on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, in a suite that shares a wall with the section of granite where the test panels are to go. Ochsendorf said the location came up once in a staff meeting and was entered in the minutes as a scheduling matter.
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is first on the list. It is also the only one of the 41 that anyone has gone to court over, which Ochsendorf attributed to the paint.
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