By DARLENE SUPERVILLE

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump ’s White House ballroom project is way too big and should be scaled back, an architect and member of the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation said Wednesday — one of a number of changes he has suggested for a project he says could permanently alter the nation’s most recognizable historic home.

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David Scott Parker, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects whose firm specializes in residential design and historic preservation, shared his views with The Associated Press as a key federal agency, the National Capital Planning Commission, prepared to meet Thursday to vote on whether to approve the 90,000-square-foot project. A separate federal panel, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, approved the project at its February meeting.

“Everything here feels inflated,” said Parker, who has been an architect for more than 35 years. “The net effect of this is to adversely impact what is the most important historic — the most identifiable historic — house in the entire United States. This is permanent, what it will do to the White House.”

Trump announced last summer he would be add a ballroom to the White House, citing the need for space other than a tent on the lawn to entertain important guests. He demolished the East Wing in October with little warning and underground construction to prepare the site has been underway since then. White House officials have said above-ground construction would not start before April, at the earliest.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private, nonprofit group, asked a federal judge to temporarily halt construction until the White House submitted the construction plans to both federal panels and to Congress for approval, and allowed the public to comment. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rejected the request last week, and the Trust has said it plans to file an amended lawsuit.

Parker’s architectural analysis was based on renderings and other information the White House submitted to the fine arts commission last month.

President Donald Trump speaks about the new ballroom construction before a Medal of Honor ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Monday, March 2, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The ballroom itself takes up about 22,000 square feet of the total space, and Parker said that is far larger than needed for the 1,000 guests Trump has said it would accommodate. The industry standard for a ballroom allots 15 square feet per person, Parker said. By that measure, Trump’s ballroom could be 47% smaller — or no bigger than 15,000 square feet, he said.

The proposal includes a 4,000-square-foot, south-facing porch and staircase. Parker said these are unnecessary since they don’t provide guests with direct access to the interior of the building. He said the porch doesn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The White House said Wednesday that the ballroom will comply with the federal law requiring accommodations for people with disabilities, but did not provide further comment on Parker’s critique.

The proposed portico is significantly larger than the portico on the south side of the White House and the south side of the Treasury Department building nearby.

Artist renderings and diagrams of the new White House East Wing and Ballroom, briefly posted on the National Capital Planning Commission’s website ahead of a March 5, hearing, are photographed Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

Concerns about the project’s size have followed it from the start. At nearly twice the size of the main White House itself, which is 55,000 square feet, critics have argued the addition would overwhelm the mansion and throw off the symmetry of the complex.

Parker said his other main concern is that the addition would stick out just enough so that it impedes the line of sight along Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol as it was purposely designed hundreds of years ago by Pierre L’Enfant, who was hired by George Washington to lay out the U.S. capital.

“It’s hard to fathom that … one addition could have so many adverse impacts, symbolically, architecturally and historically,” Parker said. “This literally violates the Founding Fathers’ intentions.”

Parker is listed among more than 100 people registered to speak at Thursday’s commission meeting, which is scheduled to be conducted online, according to the agency’s website. Thousands of people submitted comments in advance and many were opposed to Trump’s project.

By SARA CLINE and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

It remained unclear Wednesday whether ballots cast during extended polling place hours in Texas’ primary will be counted in two counties that saw mass confusion over voting locations.

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Such votes have been set aside in Dallas County after the Texas Supreme Court stepped in Tuesday night, staying a lower court’s ruling. As of Wednesday afternoon, county election officials were still waiting for direction on whether the ballots should be included in vote totals.

The same issue affected Williamson County, north of Austin, which had hours extended at two polling places and has since had the last-minute ballots set aside.

But for Democrats in deeply blue Dallas County, the state’s second most populous, they say their hopes are dwindling. Terri Burke, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said the Supreme Court’s action was expected because it’s hard to get poll hours extended under Texas law.

“In a lot of ways, nobody was surprised by the writ from the Supreme Court last night,” Burke said. She added it’s likely the late ballots won’t be counted.

It is unclear exactly how many ballots were cast during the extended hours. According to data on the Dallas County Elections Department’s website, 2,316 in-person “provisional” ballots were rejected or pending, a number that includes any ballots flagged for a variety of issues as well as those the high court ordered to be segregated. A total of nearly 280,000 people voted in the county’s election, based on unofficial figures from the department.

Of greater concern, Burke said, was the chaos unleashed by the precinct-only voting system that Dallas County was forced to use because of a change by local Republicans, who refused to use a system that allowed voters to cast a ballot anywhere in the county, as they had done since 2019. Voters instead could cast ballots only at their assigned precinct. Under state law, Democrats had to use the same method.

Confused and frustrated, some voters were turned away from polling places on Tuesday and directed to other locations.

“There is a case to be made, and we can document it, there were people who were disenfranchised,” Burke said.

Primary voters line up to cast ballots at a voting center in Dallas, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

She said she will attempt to push the legislature to repeal the 2006 law that requires both parties to hold a joint primary to prevent this sort of chaos: “If one party wants to wreck their primary, they should be able to do that but they should not be able to wreck someone else’s.”

In Dallas County, a judge ordered polls to remain open for two hours past the scheduled 7 p.m. closing time, citing “voter confusion so severe” that it caused the website of the county election office to crash. The judge was acting on a petition filed by the local Democratic Party in a heavily left-leaning county. The extension applied only to Democratic voting precincts.

There was initial concern that it could affect the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because Dallas is the home base of Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, but she later conceded to James Talarico, a state lawmaker.

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who advanced to a runoff Tuesday against Sen. John Cornyn for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, challenged the lower court’s ruling. Shortly after, the state Supreme Court stayed both decisions in Dallas and Williamson counties. Its brief orders said ballots cast by voters in both counties who were not in line by the 7 p.m. scheduled close of polls should be separated.

Emily French, the policy director for Common Cause Texas, a voting advocacy group, said it is standard for ballots that are cast during extended poll hours to be set aside. In El Paso, for example, voting was extended for an hour on Tuesday after problems with voter check-in systems earlier in the day. French said she expects them to ultimately be tallied if no one is contesting the extension.

Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, said the organization is continuing “to monitor this situation and will be weighing all options to ensure every Texan is able to have their vote counted.”

By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — A protester and three U.S. Capitol Police officers were treated for injuries in a Senate office building on Wednesday after the protester resisted arrest for disruptive behavior and grabbed onto a doorway as the officers and a Republican senator tried to drag him out of the room.

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The protester, Brian C. McGinnis of North Carolina, was arrested and faces three counts of assaulting a police officer and three counts of resisting arrest and unlawful demonstration, the Capitol Police said in a statement.

“This afternoon, an unruly man who started to illegally protest during a hearing put everyone in a dangerous position by violently resisting and fighting our officer’s attempts to remove him from the room,” Capitol Police said in a statement.

Multiple videos show that McGinnis stood up and started shouting during the Senate Armed Services hearing and that police officers immediately grabbed him and tried to remove him from the room. McGinnis was protesting the U.S. military campaign in Iran, shouting, “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!”

The officers pulled McGinnis toward the exit as he violently resisted them and grabbed onto a doorway while they were trying to pull him out. Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Republican member of the Armed Services panel who is a former Navy SEAL, ran over to assist and pull the protester’s arm off the door as other protesters yelled that McGinnis’ hand was stuck.

Capitol Police said in the statement that McGinnis “got his own arm stuck in a door to resist our officers and force his way back into the hearing room,” and said he was treated for his injuries.

Sheehy said in a statement on social media that he was trying to de-escalate the situation.

“This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one,” Sheehy said, “I hope he gets the help he needs without causing further violence.”

A video posted on an X account under the name Brian McGinnis appears to show the same man standing outside the Capitol on Wednesday morning before the hearing. The account’s description says he is a “Green Party Candidate for US Senate.”

He says in the video that he was “here in D.C. trying to speak out against the Senate” to ask them about sending the country into war.

“Anyone who feels disillusioned and betrayed by our government, you are not alone,” he says in the video.

After a decade of debate and more than two years of review, the St. Paul City Council has approved new regulations around drive-throughs.

Council Member Saura Jost, who took the lead on amending existing drive-through regulations, said she sought to balance business interests and public demand for quick access to food, pharmacies and banking with calls for a safer and more pedestrian-friendly urban environment.

The new rules approved Wednesday do not cap the number of drive-through businesses in the city — which is currently around 75 — but they do bar drive-through lanes within 660 feet of light rail, streetcar or bus rapid transit stations, including planned stations along fully-funded or federally-approved transit corridors. That’s the same distance as a typical city block.

In zoning districts that blend retail and housing, dubbed T3-T4 “traditional neighborhood” districts, the drive-through service windows must be part of a building that is at least four stories in height and 40,000 square feet in floor area.

The ordinance amendment spells out the required number of off-street “stacking” spaces in queuing lanes — six for banks and pharmacies, 12 for fast-food, 14 for coffee shops — and emphasizes that “in no event are vehicles permitted to stack into public sidewalks, trails, bicycle lanes, alleys, or streets.” Additional stacking beyond the minimums could be required by a zoning administrator following site plan review by city staff.

With an eye toward public safety, drive-throughs may continue to operate into the night, long after their on-site dining areas close to the public. A drive-through window is not allowed to double as a walk-up.

For bank, pharmacy and credit unions, drive-through lanes and service windows must be located to the side or rear of buildings and at least 60 feet from a residentially-zoned property, unless that property sits across a major arterial street, or it’s somehow buffered by the building the drive-through is attached to. An exception would be if the residential units are situated in the same building.

If the drive-through is for food and beverages, the distance requirement increases to 120 feet.

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