Trump’s D.C. hero garden expands to plazas, dining, and amphitheater

What began as a statue garden has swollen into a far larger federal landscape project, with plans now calling for formal gardens, reflecting pools, plazas, dining facilities and an amphitheater around 250 statues of notable Americans. The expansion has pushed the project beyond symbolism alone and into the question of who pays for a monument that is now estimated to cost more than the $40 million Congress approved in 2025 for the Garden of American Heroes.

The project traces back to Executive Order 13934, issued on July 3, 2020, and then revived in January 2021. Now the Trump administration is looking at West Potomac Park, just south of the National Mall, as the likely site, a choice that could require major redevelopment of an area now used largely for sports fields. That would place the project on some of the most visible federal ground in Washington and deepen the stakes over how presidential memory is written into public space.

The names under consideration show the scale of the political and cultural ambition, with John Adams, Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, Chief Joseph and Steve Jobs among those reported. Sculpture experts who have reviewed the plans say the schedule is “completely unworkable,” warning that the country does not have enough museum-caliber foundries and sculptors to produce 250 life-size figures on the timeline envisioned. The statues alone could exceed the congressional allocation, leaving the broader buildout dependent on additional approvals and a more complex financial path than the original appropriation suggested.

The approval structure matters as much as the art. Landscaping and tree-clearing at East Potomac Golf Links are set to begin after the final tee time on Sunday under pre-approved National Park Service plans, but more extensive renovations would wait for design approval and legal compliance. The Interior Department has already notified National Links Trust that it is terminating the 50-year lease the National Park Service signed in 2020 to manage East Potomac, Langston Golf Course and Rock Creek Park Golf Course. The administration is also offering a renewed lease for Rock Creek, though National Links Trust says it has not received one, and the Washington Post reported that the administration approached the Washington Commanders about Langston. Taken together, the golf moves and the hero garden plans point to a broader effort to remake federal land, public recreation and civic memory in Washington at once.