The National Links Trust’s Battle with the Trump Administration, Explained

On October 2, 2020, the National Links Trust signed a 50-year lease with the National Park Service to manage and improve Washington, D.C.’s three municipal golf facilities: East Potomac Golf Links, Rock Creek Park Golf Course, and Langston Golf Course.

This might not sound like a significant event, but it was. The National Links Trust (NLT) is not an ordinary leaseholder. It is an ambitious and high-minded nonprofit group, committed to a vision of affordable, architecturally compelling golf. Plus, East Potomac, Rock Creek, and Langston are not ordinary municipal golf courses. All are on the National Register of Historic Places, and each has a notable design pedigree and a deep connection to the life of the city.

The NLT wants to keep these courses accessible while turning them into leading lights of municipal golf in America. But it might not get the chance.

The Department of the Interior (DOI), which oversees the National Park Service (NPS), has now terminated the NLT’s lease, clearing the way for the Trump administration to exert more direct control over the courses.

The DOI started laying the groundwork for this move several months ago. On August 1, 2025, DOI Secretary Doug Burgum and Solicitor William Doffermyre pitched President Donald Trump on transforming East Potomac Golf Links into a high-end professional tournament venue named “Washington National Golf Course.” President Trump quickly warmed to the idea. However, Burgum and Doffermyre likely recognized that their plan was at odds with the NLT’s own intention to work with architect Tom Doak to restore East Potomac’s reversible Walter Travis design.

Soon the conflict between the DOI and the NLT bubbled into public view. On October 29, Doffermyre issued a formal default notice to the NLT, and in November, architect Tom Fazio, the President’s choice to guide the renovation at East Potomac, toured the course and visited the White House. Finally, last Tuesday, Doffermyre sent a termination letter to the NLT.

In an odd twist, the NLT will remain the day-to-day operator of East Potomac, Rock Creek, and Langston for the short term. Evidently, the Trump administration had no other plan for keeping the facilities open.

Doffermyre’s termination letter made three key assertions about the NLT’s performance over the past five years:

1. The NLT failed to make substantial capital improvements to the courses according to the schedule specified by the lease.

2. The NLT did not provide a “reasonable and credible” cure proposal after the initial default notice.

3. The NLT owes as much as $8.8 million in unpaid rent to the NPS.

Since these claims have been adopted as talking points by some on social media, it’s worth assessing them one by one. The following are my own interpretations and opinions, based on my reporting and conversations with multiple sources close to the issue. I also sent a list of questions to a DOI spokesperson, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Has the NLT underdelivered on the lease’s promises?

The DOI’s primary rationale for killing the lease is that the NLT has fallen behind on the agreed-upon improvement projects. In an addendum to the lease titled “Exhibit D,” the NLT proposed to finish renovations at Rock Creek by 2022, Langston by 2024, and East Potomac by 2027. The DOI says that the NLT has not made substantial progress at Rock Creek and has not started the projects at Langston and East Potomac.

I disagree with the DOI’s description of the Rock Creek renovation, which the NLT planned, permitted, and broke ground on before the termination letter halted construction. But it’s true that the projects at all three courses have taken longer than Exhibit D suggested they might.

What the DOI leaves out, however, is that Exhibit D contains the following phrase: “[T]imeframes are general and subject to change due to compliance timeframes or other circumstances.” In other words, the dates in the lease are tentative, and the DOI appears to be misrepresenting them as firm and binding.

Hindsight being 20/20, the NLT’s schedule in Exhibit D was overly ambitious, perhaps naïve. Completing overhauls of Rock Creek in two years, Langston in four, and East Potomac in seven would have been an achievement unprecedented in the history of American municipal golf. Maybe the NLT believed that its close relationship with the NPS would speed up the usual compliance processes. This has not been the case. Every change proposed by the NLT has taken a winding, brambly path through the NPS’s bureaucracy. At Rock Creek, for instance, the NLT had to justify its tree-removal program literally one tree at a time.

Still, the NLT has made $8.5 million worth of upgrades to the courses since 2020. A large chunk of this money — $3.6 million — went to planning the Rock Creek renovation and ushering the project through the permitting quagmire. The NLT has also spent about $1 million on tree removal at the Rock Creek property over the past two years. Meanwhile, the group has pushed through an array of smaller projects at East Potomac and Langston, removing invasive vegetation, improving drainage systems, and installing Toptracer technology at both courses; expanding greens, overhauling the irrigation system, and regrassing the driving range at Langston; and restoring a historically significant mini-golf course at East Potomac. Every D.C.-area golfer I’ve spoken with says the courses are in better shape than they were five years ago.

That’s a lot of activity, especially in a tough regulatory environment. For some perspective, I serve on the golf advisory committee in Portland, Oregon. Last year, the operator of Portland’s municipal golf facilities installed a single Toptracer range at a single course, and we considered it a coup.

Doing as much as the NLT has done in the past five years is highly unusual in big-city American municipal golf.

Did the NLT not respond sufficiently to the DOI’s default notice?

In his termination letter, Doffermyre asserts that the NLT failed to provide a “reasonable and credible cure proposal” in response to the October 29 default notice.

The problem for the NLT was that the default notice did not contain specifics on what needed to be cured. It was two sentences long, alluding to a general “failure to make the Initial Improvements described in Exhibit D and Construction Documents” and declaring Doffermyre’s hope to “find a mutually acceptable path forward.”

Yet it seems that the NLT did mount a substantial effort to address the government’s concerns. Doffermyre’s termination letter acknowledges that the NLT was involved in “multiple in-person meetings, teleconferences, and written submissions during the [45-day] cure period.” In addition, the NLT spent approximately $1 million to mobilize construction at Rock Creek after receiving the default notice.

It’s unclear what the NLT could have done in November and December to stave off termination.

Does the NLT owe the government $8.8 million?

After laying out his case for ending the NLT’s lease, Doffermyre drops what seems to be a bombshell: “NPS leadership has recently discovered that NLT owes NPS millions of dollars in unpaid rent.”

As the Washington Post first reported, though, the NLT’s agreement with the NPS allows rent to be offset by the amount spent on capital-improvement projects. Furthermore, the NLT maintains that all rent offsets were directly approved by the NPS. The numbers roughly line up: the DOI is pointing to an $8.8-million discrepancy, and the NLT has spent about $8.5 million on capital-improvement projects.

To me, the claim that the NLT is millions of dollars behind on rent doesn’t appear to hold any water.

In the coming months, journalism about the National Links Trust's battle for survival will be heavy with details of this sort. It will revolve around lease agreements, cure proposals, rent offsets, and other such legalities. If that sounds tedious or intimidating, I'm right there with you. I have about as much desire to study the machinations of government lawyers as I do to stand naked at the 100-yard marker at the East Potomac driving range. But I think it's worth staying informed about the specifics of the NLT's dealings with the Trump administration. This isn't just a D.C. story. It's a story about the fragility of affordable public golf in America, and about the difficulty of doing the right thing for the game.