Trump Exaggerates Previous Spending on Reflecting Pool

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool began filling with water on June 4 following maintenance work that President Donald Trump called a “big project.” In late May, Trump claimed that “the Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed,” adding that his administration was spending “$10 million, maybe, $12 million.”

But that exaggerates the amount spent by previous administrations. We could find no record of any major work done during former President Joe Biden’s term, and the total spent for an overhaul of the pool during former President Barack Obama’s term was about $35 million.

According to the publicly available federal contract, the Trump administration has spent about $14 million to repaint and seal the bottom of the pool, which has a history of leaks.

The pool was completely refilled with water by June 9, as shown in a PBS News timelapse of the progress.

Trump made his comments about prior work on the Reflecting Pool in a May 27 Cabinet meeting. “It’s embarrassing,” he said of the condition of the pool. “It was filthy, dirty. It was Biden. And they spent, between the two of them, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix this thing. Now, when Biden — when Obama did it, he spent way over $100 million.” 

The work done by the current administration, Trump said, included sandblasting the surface and painting it blue. “We made the surface as good as it can be and we’re now covering it with the most beautiful blue, very thick,” he said. “You think of it as a very sophisticated form of rubber, no leaks, no problems. And it’s beautiful. It’s called American Flag blue. That was the color we chose.”

We asked the National Park Service for details about the scope of the recent work, but we didn’t get a response. Trump has mentioned repeatedly that the pool was being repainted, which is reflected in the publicly available information about the contract. Based on government documents it obtained, the New York Times reported that the scope of work also involves repairs to some of the leaking crevices between the concrete slabs at the bottom of the pool.

Extensive work to rebuild the pool started in 2010 and concluded in 2012 during the Obama administration. That project used funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — stimulus legislation enacted in response to the Great Recession — to essentially replace the original pool that was first built in the early 1920s.

“The old reflecting pool was built with an asphalt and tile bottom on poorly supported soil consisting primarily of marshes,” one of the companies that worked on that project had written at the time, explaining that the pool had sunk a foot into the ground over time.

That project also switched the source of the water from the city’s municipal system to the nearby Tidal Basin fed by the Potomac River, with an ozone water filtration system, according to the National Park Service. There was an unexpected amount of algae when the new pool first opened, according to a Washington Post report at the time, which said that the ozone levels in the filtration system needed adjustment.

Some maintenance issues over the years — such as a broken water line in 2019, according to the National Park Service — led to water quality issues in the pool that required repair.

During the May Cabinet meeting, Trump referred to the change in the water source during the 2012 project, saying, “the water from the Potomac was not suitable for this, to put it mildly. It was disgusting what happened.” But we couldn’t find any information indicating that the source of the water for the pool has changed under Trump. We asked the White House, the Interior Department and the NPS about the water source, but we didn’t get a response.

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