Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

1. White House Office · Notable

Reexamine permanent press space on the White House campus

Partially done

29 1. White House Office

“No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The administration reopened the question of who occupies the White House's limited press space without waiting for anyone's permission. At her first briefing the Press Secretary announced changes to the James S. Brady Briefing Room, invited independent journalists, podcasters and content creators to apply for credentials, and turned the front-row seat normally used by press staff into a standing "new media" seat. By April 2025 a federal court recorded that the White House Correspondents Association assigns briefing-room seats only "at the White House's discretion" and that the pool had been rearranged to trade a wire-service seat and a photography seat for two new-media seats. Partial and not done because the Quote's larger claim — that no legal entitlement exists to permanent media space on the campus, and that the balance should be reexamined — has produced a reallocation of seats rather than any withdrawal of permanent space, and no allowlisted record shows workspace on the campus being reduced.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-27, with Chapter 1’s other White House asks.

  • whitehouse.gov, 2025-01-28 press briefing (read in full): the Press Secretary announced changes to the James S. Brady Briefing Room, opened it to “new media voices … not already represented by one of the seats in this room”, and converted the front-row press-staff seat into a permanent “new media” seat.
  • Associated Press v. Budowich, D.D.C. No. 25-0532, opinion of 2025-04-08 (read via the court’s PDF at ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov): the court sets out the White House’s own position that “[n]o legal entitlement” attaches to these spaces, describes the 49-seat Brady Briefing Room shared by 65 outlets, and records that the WHCA “continues to assign, ‘at the White House’s discretion,’ the seats in the Brady Briefing Room” — that is, the discretion the Mandate asserts is now asserted.
  • Reported but not used as Evidence: the White House’s plan to impose its own briefing-room seating chart (Axios 2025-03-30, Washington Post 2025-03-31, The Hill). Both pages could not be read, and a page we could not read is a lead, not Evidence; the Primary record above carries the same point.
  • No allowlisted record shows permanent press workspace on the campus being withdrawn.
Action
restrict
Object
permanent media space on the White House campus
ID
9