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Arlington National Cemetery conducts up to thirty funerals a day for fallen service members. The arch project, as currently planned, would run three years of pile driving and heavy construction noise close enough to disrupt them. That detail did not come from an opponent of the project. It came from an Army veteran testifying at a public hearing, and it landed hard enough that the commission's own Trump appointed chair admitted afterward he had not previously considered it and asked Interior to develop a mitigation plan. Everything else about how this project has moved through the system explains why that detail almost got missed. The National Park Service gave the public ten days to review a 277 page assessment of the arch's effects, called exceedingly narrow and highly unusual by the process's own former federal chair. Six historic preservation groups that requested a seat at the table were excluded outright until a public letter calling it an abuse of discretion forced a late invitation, and even then only one meeting has happened since. The agency's own report never mentions relocating the monument as an alternative, despite Washington's own historic preservation officer proposing exactly that. None of this required breaking a single law outright. It required stretching every discretionary choice inside the law as far as it would go, shrinking comment windows, thinning the guest list, skipping the alternative site analysis that normally comes standard, while still technically checking each procedural box. The rule change now being considered at the federal level would take that same approach and make it the default nationwide, for every historic highway, federal building, and memorial project going forward, not just one arch near a cemetery that buries thirty families a day.