The Washington DC reflection pool, which sits between the Washington monument and the Lincoln memorial, went from a “before” situation of leaky with algae-green water, to “after”, which was supposedly fixed, but led to a worsened condition… a putrid mess of full on algal blooms and large chunks of peeling paint floating in the water.
How did this before and after occurrence even happen? Keep reading…
Full timeline reveals algae blooms due to paint problems in Washington DC reflection pool
Arrests for alleged vandalism of the pool’s new protective paint-layer by citizens aside (because that is another issue entirely since there is no evidence regarding the people they charged), the answer is revealed in information gleaned by my friend Larry Arnold who wrote the article below.
The actual timeline of how it all went down, to the minute in many cases, is here, with full quotes and properly done research. (published with permission)
You’ll find my own comments afterwards on potential SOLUTIONS to this major peeling paint and expensive all-on-taxpayers’-pocketbooks problem. Proper solutions, themselves, have been lacking in this reflection pool debacle.
AS I SEE IT: A Metaphor for the Algae …
© 2026 Larry E Arnold
April 23, 2026. Thirty-eight minutes into a scheduled 3:00PM health care affordability event in the Oval Office, President Trump inexplicably pivots to a ten-minute weave about “a pool, lake and pond…the word reflecting is a good term.”
Thus begins Trump 47’s public plunge into one of the nation’s iconic monuments: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The ensuing saga has flummoxed and fascinated the world. However, to our knowledge it has not been detailed chronologically. To paraphrase an axiom, details hide a devil.
Let’s time-stamp its evolution, then, to discover what lurks submerged.
April 23, 3:40PM: “And over the years, as a developer, I’ve probably built more than 100 swimming pools in different buildings I built. And I have some really good pool builders,” boasts Mr. Trump about his master-level knowledge of the craft that guarantees his competent rehabilitation of the “dirty, disgusting” Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C.
April 23, 3:43PM: The president recreates a conversation he says he had with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum about the Reflecting Pool: “Doug, I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road where I have a club. … I’m going to send my contractor over to take a look. He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it. … It’ll take me two weeks.’”
April 23, 3:43PM: Mr. Trump suggests the job be colored “turquoise, like in the Bahamas.” His pool guy recommends American Flag Blue, instead. The president is ecstatic: “That’s the color I like!”
He then halves his contractor’s stupefyingly speedy two-week schedule, stating “Our job will take one week. It will cost about a million and a half dollars. And people said, ‘Wow.’ … This will last 30, 40, 50 years.”
April 23, 3:45PM: “We’re using the existing surface, so we don’t have to spend millions of dollars in demolition.” He shows a picture of a banner at the site that credits himself and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum for the project.
April 23, 3:46PM: “And you’re going to end up with a beautiful beautiful reflecting pool the way it’s supposed to be. Much better than it ever was, actually. It’ll stay clean…and you’ll have it before July 4th. … We’re spending less than two million dollars.”
April 23, 3:47PM: After the weave veers into the cost of White House pens, the president regroups: “So, we’re going to have in another couple of weeks, we going to have the most beautiful reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial that you’ve ever seen. And I hope the media can go over and maybe watch …”
Rehabing the capital’s premier “pool, lake and pond,” as he calls it, becomes a highlight for his “DC SAFE & BEAUTIFUL” and Freedom250 initiatives.
By the end of this meeting, one thing is as crystal-clear as a pallucid pool: Mr. Trump is taking accountability for the project. This is his project.
The project requires three phases: 1) drain water; 2) inspect, sanitize, repair or replace prolifically leaking underground plumbing; 3) seal the concrete base and perimeter and apply the “American Flag Blue” that Mr. Trump has proudly chosen. Phase 2 is crucial; if unaddressed, underground infrastructure leaks unresolved by previous administrations will continue.
April 27: Atlantic Industrial Coatings LLC drains the pool and begins restoration. AIC will do Phases 1 and 3. The company’s website does not mention swimming pools, at Trump golf clubs or anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Green Water Solutions aka Greenwater Services – the company’s names will not escape irony – will presumably tackle Phase 2 with a $1,740,255.50 no-bid contract to use dubious ozone-nanobubble sanitizing technology to kill algae in the existing piping and pump station. Federal contracting records show the firm’s ultimate owner is a trust led by two-time felon John J. Cafaro, a long-time Trump financial donor whom the president calls “a fantastic man” who patronizes Mar-a-Lago.
Master builder Donald J. Trump disregards the most important aspect of Phase 2, however: century-old underground pipes that contribute to leakage of 16 million gallons annually, enough to fill the pool four times over. They are pipes-non-grata.
May 4: At a White House small business summit, Mr. Trump, the unrivaled businessman, repeats himself: “I have some very good contractors, some good, one or two in particular. And I sent the two of them, actually, the three best. I said, ‘Do me a favor, fellas, go take a look at the reflecting pool that sits in between Lincoln and Washington, the beautiful – what should be beautiful – reflecting pool.’” About his personally approved American Flag Blue, he extols: “This will last for at least 50 years, and you’ll never have a leak. … 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything.” Plus, “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, so strong, so powerful!” Project completion will be “two weeks.”
May 7: After a week’s work at the Reflecting Pool, AIC is officially awarded its first federal contract; a “sole source” procurement, owner Curtis E. Wood tells NBC News. This means non-competitive purchasing by the government and that AIC is the only available vendor in America capable – or willing – to do the job specifications.
(The New Republic on May 27 reports the Trump administration allowed AIC to start work before agreeing on the price tag, thus giving AIC inordinate leverage to upsurge its price or “walk away with a half-finished job” should the government object. USA Today on June 25 reports AIC “had already been contracted for nearly $6.9 million to take on the project on April 3.”)
May 7, pre-dusk: An 11-vehicle motorcade of two “Beast” presidential limos (7-10 tons each) and nine SUVs (about 6 tons each) drives the length of the Reflecting Pool to afford Mr. Trump a close-up look at his project. Vehicles drive over freshly applied concrete sealer and park on the polyurea liner, itself not fabricated to be driven over. No consequences of that to foresee, right?
“We’re fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial,” he tells the gathered press corps about the project now costing around $2 million. “It’s going to take one week.”
May 8: The AIC contract is now at $13.1 million, officially. A 655% hike overnight?
May 11: Mr. Trump says project completion will be “two weeks.”
May 12, 6:46AM: @DonaldTrump addresses price increases. “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before.” Not addressed is – if true – why Interior passed over his own “really good pool builders” with whom he consulted. Trump’s bus has started backing up –
May 12, 7:10PM: “When it is complete, there will be no leakage,” @DonaldTrump posts, “and it will SPARKLE magnificently as the water is put in, and begins to rise. A very tricky and difficult construction job will yield a beautiful result!”
May 16, 12:55PM: @DonaldTrump posts “The goal is to have it done, at this higher level, prior to July 4th — We are ahead of schedule!” The post shows a picture labeled “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers” that bizarrely shows a vertical Reflecting Pool towering over three skyscrapers. Comparison to RMS Titanic would be more logical and, eventually, more appropriate.
(Fact check: technically the placard is true because three skyscrapers – Burj Khalifa, Merdeka 118, and Shanghai Tower – are taller than the pool is long but, like Mr. Trump’s consulted pool experts, they get overlooked.)
May 16, 5:10PM: “I am in construction now, have decided to go to a much higher level of repair,” @DonaldTrump posts about the cascading cost. Acting as the project foreman too, he intimates. “The goal is to have it done, at this higher level, prior to July 4th — We are ahead of schedule!”
May 27: Flanked by the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense at a Cabinet meeting, the president does pool-talk. Much of it echoes his April 23 and May 4 weaves, with a notable change. Project responsibility has shifted: “I actually called in a couple of the contractors, got some ideas from them and I gave it to Doug and Doug’s done an unbelievable job.”
The Secretary of the Interior will hear a bus backing-up should there be problems –
Nevertheless, his boss is confident and promises “it’ll be better than it ever was when it was built in 1922. It’s very exciting, actually. To me, I love construction. … We made the surface as good as it can be, and we’re now covering it with the most beautiful blue, very thickly. … It’ll last for 50 years, maybe 100 years.”
May 29: Workers for Mid-America Industrial Coatings spray a light blue layer atop a dark blue undercoat.
June 3: Federal records indicate an nonspecific transaction raises the cost to $14.2 million. Perhaps to distract from this, during the day’s Oval Office presser Mr. Trump joyfully holds up the “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers” sign (see @DonaldTrump, May 16) and expounds without noting – or knowing – there are larger skyscrapers.
June 4, early morning: Refilling begins. The Interior Department declares its Recreation Enhancement Fee Program to repair the pool is finished. Mr. Trump gleefully claims the project gets “rave reviews.”
June 6, 1:48PM: @DonaldTrump announces “All work is complete! … It was originally opened in 1922, but never functioned properly – now it does!”
June 9: National Park Police see damage to or near the pool’s repaired foam expansion joints.
June 14: An algae bloom attributed to residual algae in the plumbing turns the pool green. Will taxpayers get taken for $1,740,255.50 by the president’s “fantastic man” for doing a faulty job? (And what’s with that 50 cents?)
June 15: The White House posts a picture of the Reflecting Pool’s water being blue. It isn’t blue today.
Another AIC surcharge brings the price to $14.65 million – 800% above Mr. Trump’s initial lowball estimate. When an inept project manager approves a non-competitive contract, expect this.
June 16: Tourists watch skimmers scoop up and pump out greenback-colored algae while National Park personnel empty jugs of hydrogen peroxide in a futile effort to de-algae and decontaminate.
It’s now the Pool of Warm Ooze. MAGA becomes Making Algae Grow Again. So much for the touted decades-lasting renovation.
June 18: The Interior Department proclaims the Reflecting Pool is “crystal clear.” It isn’t. Detached chunks of American Flag Blue bob in the water.
June 20-22: Per Mr. Trump, “saboteurs” have “vandalized” the pool by slicing through the alleged impervious America flag blue polyurea with a “box-cutter or a knife” to create a “290, 300 … not 250, a 350-foot slit from one end to the other.” (The Pool is 2030 feet long.) “But somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae,” he laments, because his fantastic donor contractor-friend had surely obliterated it all weeks earlier.
National Guardsmen now patrol the pool rather than be home with family.
June 22, 8:27PM: “This is American exceptionalism,” Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker of the House, unabashedly tells FoxNews about the president’s pool prettification. Seriously, Kevin?
June 23, 9:56AM: @DonaldTrump is still blaming “vandals” for the debacle, then solemnly announces “We will drain some of the water, either immediately before or after the Fourth of July, to do the permanent repair.”
June 23, 1:17PM: Under an umbrella in Reading, Mr. Trump declares “The reflecting pool looks beautiful! … I’ve just seen pictures.” But sir, 201 minutes earlier you believed otherwise. In truth, reliable pictures verify green slime still swamps the Reflecting Pool.
June 25: Two employees with Sika Corporation, which provided concrete construction and sealing products for a 2010 Reflecting Pool renovation, tell CNN that their company was given an opportunity to do Trump’s 2026 remodel. Sika balked because, they say, demands that a) it be done by July 4, and b) the pool bottom be blue, made the job “unfeasible.”
June 26+: Unlike the Reflecting Pool’s ongoing myriad problems, because Mr. Trump’s judgment is always watertight, it’s Back-Up-The-Bus time to splash blame onto others. Never mind that @DonaldTrump on June 6 said it “never functioned properly – now it does!”
Total cost so far for a defective job: $14,650,000.00 + $1,740,255.50 = $16,490,255.50.
Total cost after repairing the first Trump Repair: ??
Courts, no doubt, will eventually decide the merits of arrests for alleged vandalism; the inevitable suits and countersuits; accountability and blamelessness. How the sun is held liable for heating water that blooms algae in a shallow basin will be innovative law.
Perhaps a Trump-emblazoned sunshade over the pool will be a future “DC SAFE & BEAUTIFUL” vanity project?
One place to assign blame is not arguable.
During Trump 45, the pool’s pipe-and-seal failures had been known to Interior and to National Park Service for decades. NPS insisted, then, that the thousands of feet of 12-inch pipes that move water from the pool to a treatment plant and back again must be replaced to stop seepage.
Trump 47 impetuously ignored this. Beating a July 4 deadline took precedence, he often stressed. “This project is now being completed at ‘Trump speed’ to ensure the iconic landmark is totally restored ahead of the 250th celebrations,” affirmed White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers to The New York Times (May 8).
Yes, the job got completed. Badly.
A very hurried, very temporary, very costly, arguably very tacky cosmetic fix is more important to Mr. Trump than doing the job properly so that it might actually last his promised “30, 40, 50 years … 100 years before you have to do anything …”
As so often happens in Trump World – provably with his Reflecting Pool project – shallow superficiality supersedes foundational substance. The man who brags he knows how to make deals better than anyone, again brokered a bad one. A deal not as he advertised.
This embarrassing saga of The Algae and the Agony is a metaphor for the tiresome blundering incompetence of Donald J. Trump’s governance that impacts far beyond the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
It is the perfect reflection on a person wholly unsuited to the job assigned; whose problem-fixer reputation is as undeserved as green slime is icky.
When, and how, can this international agony end?
Larry E. Arnold
A Possible Solution to the Reflection Pool Problem
Many thanks to Larry for this article above. Now for my own input…
In the real estate investing world we called this “putting lipstick on a pig” when the face of a problem is “fixed” without healing the bones of the issue. Surface-level cosmetic repairs on an ugly problem is still a problem, or like in this case, causes worse problems and then costs WAY more than it would have just to do it right the first time without doing a rush job.
First of all, a reflecting pool is NOT a swimming pool, nor should it be treated as such. I agree with Larry’s sentiments about the bid contracts as well as getting the right person for the job.
The proper persons—not one contractor alone—would have:
1) experience with reflecting pools bar none, as well as a
2) permaculture expert who has experience with natural pools so the ongoing algae issue could be remedied permanently, without sacrificing the quality of the reflection itself since that is what reflection pools are actually for. Also,
3) contractors who have experience in replacing the leaky piping system would need to be hired to deal with that. 16 million gallons of freshwater annually is a terrible waste when only 1-3% of the freshwater/groundwater in the US (and the world) is drinkable, not to mention that many aquifers around the world are slowly drying up.
The heads of these three contractors, put together, would solve the issue for the long term. This means the leaks and issues with the piping and pool itself would have been dealt with, and underwater plants and/or wetland filter to clean the water (so the reflective properties of the pool are maintained), as well as certain types of fish and/or water fleas (that eat algae) and algae inhibitors (like submerged barley straw mats, etc.), so that algae is dealt with by nature in a properly designed ecosystem, and should never ever need chemicals to maintain this beautiful reflection pool.
This is all a more sustainable solution to what is now a more complex problem than it started out to be.
Thank you for your interest. Please comment below and SUBSCRIBE for other random queries and topics by an AuDHD woman.
~ Meadow Cern