A 250-Foot Arch Is About to Rise Between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Vietnam Vets Are Suing to Stop It.

For more than eighty years, the view across the Arlington Memorial Bridge has stayed essentially the same: a straight, deliberate sightline connecting Robert E. Lee's old house at Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac. That sightline is about to get a 250-foot obstruction, and the excavation to build it starts within two weeks.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum confirmed that ground crews are close to beginning excavation on President Trump's Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck — a granite-clad structure topped with three gold statues and a public observation deck, planned for the traffic circle on Columbia Island, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The National Park Service says construction will run roughly 20 hours a day, year-round, for two to three years.

The project has cleared a preliminary review from the National Capital Planning Commission, but excavation is starting before every required approval is finalized — a sequencing that has become one of the sharpest points of contention. The administration has framed the arch as a legacy monument befitting the nation's capital; Trump himself has said publicly that it should be "the biggest one of all," comparing it to arches like Paris's Arc de Triomphe.

Three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian, represented by the nonprofit Public Citizen, have sued to block construction, arguing Trump never obtained the congressional approval such a structure on federal parkland would normally require. Their core objection is the sightline itself: the space between Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial has been protected as an unobstructed, symbolically continuous view since the bridge and memorial were built in the 1930s, deliberately linking the Union and Confederacy's reconciliation with Lincoln's memory.

The lawsuit is still pending. Excavation equipment is moving in regardless. Whichever way the case goes, it likely won't be resolved before the ground is already broken.