President Trump is accelerating construction of a White House ballroom while its legality remains before the Supreme Court, arguing the project has progressed too far to stop. The administration said in a court filing that 250 workers are operating 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and that the project is now two-thirds complete. Plans for this week call for installing one million pounds of rebar and pouring 3,000 cubic yards of concrete. Trump has long argued the White House needs a ballroom to host large events without erecting a tent on the South Lawn, framing it as a matter of national prestige. More recently, as preservationists and other critics sought to block or slow the work, he has also cast the project as a national security issue by linking it to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC (secure presidential emergency bunker), beneath the former East Wing site. Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus university professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said the strategy appears aimed at changing facts on the ground so opponents would have to unwind a completed project rather than preserve the status quo.