As the nation prepares for a red, white and blue July 4 celebration, the White House is responding to a problem of a different hue: a verdant Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool rife with algae.
At Trump’s urging, federal officials this spring undertook a renovation project aimed at beautifying the historic pool on D.C.’s National Mall.
But just weeks before the project’s completion, twin controversies have the Trump administration on defense over both the process and outcomes of the renovation.
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Since Trump first announced the renovation project on April 23 – something he said he undertook after hearing from a German friend who complained the water was “dirty,” “filthy” and “sad” – the president has brought up the project to reporters, unprompted, at least 10 additional times.
During remarks in the East Room on May 4, for example, Trump lambasted previous estimates that the renovation would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, insisting he could do it better and more cheaply.
“I think we can do it for about $1.9 million,” Trump said, also announcing the pool would be coated in a new, waterproof membrane in the color “American Flag Blue.”
“This will last for at least 50 years and you'll never have a leak,” Trump said.
Since Trump’s announcement, the cost of the project has ballooned to more than $15 million dollars, federal contracting records show. And though work on the coating was completed on June 3, the pool today is less blue than green, rife with algal growth that’s drawn mockery from Trump’s critics.
“It's awful, like the rest of everything else they’re doing,” Jackie Leddone, a Northern Virginia resident visiting the pool, told Scripps News Friday.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers are now probing the procurement process for the project’s construction, as the two firms that received no-bid contracts reportedly had potential ties to Trump and his associates. The White House has denied playing a role in the contracting process, even as Trump has said publicly that one contract was given to a firm he’d worked with previously.
It’s not easy being green
Algae in the reflecting pool is nothing new, especially after renovations; algal blooms have “plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening… since 1922,” the U.S. Department of the Interior noted Wednesday, pointing specifically to algal growth following the pool’s last renovation in 2012.
Indeed, the shallow, warm water provides a perfect environment for the photosynthetic microorganisms, ecological experts told Scripps News.
“This is the normal succession of algal community development during the warm season,” Rosalina Stancheva Christova, who researches algal taxonomy and ecology at George Mason University and runs the school’s Algal Ecology Lab, told Scripps News in an interview.
On Tuesday, Christova took water samples from the pool to study under the microscope. Her findings confirmed her expectations: at this point, the vast majority of the growth in the pool is standard green algae, also known by the scientific name Desmodesmus.
Such algae are not toxic to humans and have benefits to other wildlife.
“It's normal," Christova said. “This algae, they grow, they are needed, they are very important for the ecosystem.”
Even still, the Trump administration is going to great lengths to try to clean the water.
On Friday, nearly a dozen National Park Service workers and other contractors were seen tending to the pond – vacuuming algae from the bottom and using “advanced nanobubbler technology” to pump ozone into the water to kill the growth.
Previously, crews were seen dumping bins of hydrogen peroxide into the pool as a means of clarifying it, something experts told Scripps News was unlikely to do much at current quantities.
“We would actually need large trucks coming in and dumping the hydrogen peroxide into the reflecting pool,” Jason Davison, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Catholic University of America, told Scripps News.
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“It's not shocking that they tried to do it. It was more surprising that they were going to the hardware store and using gallon bottles,” he added.
And even as the algae may be harmless to humans, the remediation efforts could change the water such that harmful organisms are more likely to grow, Davison said. Moreover, crews were seen pumping out the algae-filled water into city municipal drains, which could ultimately end up in local waterways and harm marine ecosystems.
“We won't know what type of water is actually being discharged, which could have profound impacts as well,” he said.
Contract questions
Even before the new pool coating was installed and algae bloom began, concerns were raised about the process by which the renovation contracts were doled out.
Rather than go through the typical, months-long federal procurement process – which involves conducting environmental and permitting reviews and soliciting bids from multiple firms – the Trump administration opted to award firms working on the Reflecting Pool no-bid contracts.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings L.L.C. was awarded a $14.7 million contract to repair cracks in the pool and install the new coating, records show, while Greenwater Services (also known as Green Water Solutions L.L.C.) received $1.7 million for the “nano bubble” water remediation system.
Officials justified the bidless contracts by invoking regulations allowing no-bid awards in situations of “unusual and compelling urgency,” as the administration insisted the work had to be completed ahead of the July 4 semiquincentennial celebrations.
A May lawsuit by the D.C.-based nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation sought to halt the work, arguing the administration circumvented federal laws requiring public notification of the project and mandating input from other federal agencies before work began. The Trump administration pushed forward with the renovations, completing the coating before a judge had issued any definitive ruling on the matter.
On Thursday, images and videos posted to social media appeared to show the new, blue coating peeling up from the bottom in spots. Davison said such problems were likely when a project of this scale was pursued at such a rapid pace.
“It is a rush job,” he told Scripps News. “Not having the design engineers, the environmental scientists involved is one of the main reasons why we're seeing this failure of the coating.”
And according to reporting from the New York Times, as well as public comments from Trump himself, the firms behind the construction had ties to the president.
Trump initially said he personally consulted with three companies to install the new coating, ultimately choosing one who’d worked on the swimming pool at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
“I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump told reporters on April 23. “He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’”
In a subsequent Truth Social post on May 12, however, Trump suggested he had no connection to the firm. “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” he wrote.
Representatives for Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to an inquiry about how it obtained the Reflecting Pool contract or its past work on Trump-owned properties.
Multiple Trump associates and allies, meanwhile, are reportedly tied to Greenwater Services: per the New York Times, David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, helped recruit the firm. And Green Water Solutions was recently revealed to be tied to John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor and neighbor to the president’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida, club.
Representatives for Schutzenhofer, Cafaro and the Bedminster club did not respond to inquiries from Scripps News.
Sharon Yauger, vice president of marketing for Greenwater Services, shared documentation about their nanobubble technology with Scripps News via email, but otherwise declined to speak to the Reflecting Pool project, deferring to the Interior Dept.
Representatives for the Interior Dept. did not respond to multiple inquiries about the renovation, the contracting process, the algal growth or apparent peeling of the coating.
The White House, in a statement, insisted it “did not play any role in the selection process” of the Greenwater contract.
“This contract was awarded by the Department of Interior,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public's distrust in what they read.”
Still, Democratic lawmakers are investigating. Sen. Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to Atlantic Industrial Coatings CEO Curtis Wood in mid-May, seeking information about how his firm received the Reflecting Pool contract.
Trump, for his part, posted about the situation late Friday, suggesting there had been “real problems with Vandalism at the pool.”
“The algae is 75% gone, and the condition will soon be completely remedied,” Trump wrote.
But for some visiting the pool earlier in the day, the situation had already become something of a national joke.
“It's just, you know, it looks bad,” Forest Stone, who grew up in D.C. but now lives in Upstate New York, told Scripps News. “It's kind of a joke, it's something to laugh at.”
