In April, President Donald Trump announced a project to revamp the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hiring a contractor to coat its massive granite basin at a cost of what he said would be $1.5 million. He criticized his predecessors' efforts to fix the site at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, claiming they spent “hundreds of millions of dollars."
Former President Barack Obama presided over a multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool, but the final
bill was nowhere near Trump’s estimate. And the Biden administration did not conduct any major work. As for Trump, federal spending records show that costs are significantly higher than he says.
The reflecting pool, which is more than 2,000 feet long, was originally built in the 1920s. It sits between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and is one of the most iconic sites in Washington. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously gave his “I Have a Dream” speech there in 1963.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
TRUMP: “The Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed. And we’ll be spending, you’ll give me a number, but I think it’s a very low number. It’s like in the number that we originally talked about.”
THE FACTS: This is false. The Obama administration spent at least $34 million on a massive, two-year reconstruction project that ended in 2012. No major repairs to the pool were done during the Biden administration. Trump has put the cost of the work on the pool at $1.5 million to $2 million, but records show that at least $14.8 million worth of contracts have been awarded for the project so far.
Repairs done under Obama addressed issues such as stagnant water, as well as the reality that the pool had begun to leak and sink into the land dredged from the Potomac River to build it. It was reengineered with a circulation and filtration system using river water from the nearby Tidal Basin instead of city drinking water. It was also made shallower to save water and its bottom was tinted gray to make the water darker and more reflective of the Washington Monument. Plus, paved paths were added.
An Associated Press report from the day the pool reopened in August 2012 states that the reconstruction cost $34 million. According to federal spending records, the government awarded at least $1.3 million more in contracts related to the project. But these efforts were not completely successful, as the pool continued to leak and experienced significant algae growth.
Chuck Sams, who was the director of the National Park Service for the majority of the Biden administration, told the AP that a “full rehabilitation” of the pool did not move forward after an estimate came in at more than $100 million. He said that the pool was cleaned annually during Biden's term to manage algae buildup.
Asked to comment on Trump's claim, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers wrote in an email: “Thanks to President Trump, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory ahead of America’s 250th celebrations at a fraction of the money that the former Presidents Obama and Biden squandered only to worsen its condition!”
Trump said while announcing the current renovations in April at an unrelated Oval Office appearance that he had decided to coat the pool with a new “industrial grade pool” surface hued in “American flag blue” for $1.5 million, covering up a decades-old granite surface that he said was “leaking like a sieve." According to the president, he had scrapped plans to replace the granite because it was estimated to cost $301 million and would have taken at least three years.
During Wednesday's Cabinet meeting, Trump said the pool had been steam-cleaned, fumigated and coated. He added that workers “sandblasted it, and then we pebble-blasted,” and that, to guard against leaks, crews were using “a very sophisticated form of rubber.” Trump noted that as part of the revamp, cleaning crews had removed “more than 10 dumpsters of garbage.”
Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin did not comment directly on discrepancies between what Trump says the project costs and what federal records show when asked, but said that the price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington contributed to this report.
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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
