Politics
Peak Bloom
Washington’s Reflecting Pool had an algae problem. Trump spent millions of our dollars to “fix” it. Guess what …
By
Christina Cauterucci
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June 19, 2026 9:00 AM
Photo by Christina Cauterucci
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Something dark and flat was swaying gently against the floor of the Reflecting Pool as I strolled past the monuments on Thursday morning. At first glance, it looked like a small raft of seaweed. But when I stuck my arm into the slime-green water and held the object to the light, it revealed itself as something far more evocative: a giant flake of Donald Trump’s precious sealant, which was supposed to turn the pool “American flag blue.”
One week after the president’s paint job wrapped up and the pool was refilled, the material is already coming loose from the concrete bottom of the Reflecting Pool. Where it’s not peeling off around the edges, it’s covered in chartreuse algae. As the pool has gone from blue to green over the past few weeks, the sight has offered an inescapable metaphor for the Trump administration’s ineptitude, profligate spending, careless meddling with iconic federal properties, and general bad taste.
“It looks terrible,” said Cande, a first-time D.C. visitor in town from California. Gesturing toward the water, she said the project was classic Trump: “Touches something that’s been in the United States, for us, for zillions of years, and just before the 250 th anniversary, this is what we have.”
The Department of the Interior has launched a frantic effort to fix the mess. With July Fourth and America 250 events approaching, tourists are flooding into town to see the sights. In between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial, instead of a solemn stretch of water dotted with happy ducks, they are finding a line of noisy generators operating pumps along the granite rim. The pumps are blowing air in the water to kill the algae with oxygen; the only ducks I saw were lined up at the edge, refusing to jump in even when approached by photographers. On Thursday, workers in rubber pants roamed the water with vacuums that sucked up the algae in neat rows. It appears to be a more effective solution than the gallons of hydrogen peroxide that were dumped in the pool earlier this week.
Steve Caputo, a Trump supporter visiting from New Jersey for the first time in decades, said he’d expected the renovation to be done by now but wasn’t bothered by the mess. “I see effort,” he said. “I’d love to see our monuments well cared for, and everything else we’ve seen thus far is immaculate.”
Other viewers were less impressed. The pool redo is “a good intention that, like a lot of things with the president’s administration, they don’t think it all out,” said Richard Garcia, a D.C. resident who was touring the monuments with a daughter from out of town. “It was pretty impressive before all of this, and now it just seems they’ve created a problem that didn’t need to be created.”
To be fair, previous presidential administrations have tried and failed to keep the pool algae-free. President Barack Obama spent more than $35 million on a water treatment facility and leak fixes, only to see the leaks and algae come right back. The unmoving, shallow water can’t help but grow algae in the beating sun, and since the concrete expands and contracts with shifting temperatures, any seals along the seams have struggled to remain watertight.
But Trump’s pool efforts have seemed self-serving to some critics, as he has turned America’s semiquincentennial festivities into a personal celebration , with a birthday UFC fight and a rally. The president also made a big deal of promising that his Reflecting Pool gussy up would only cost $1.5 million, then gave a no-bid contract to a company that charged more than $13 million for the job, with about twice the profit margin of a typical government contractor. He has since spent about $3 million more , with further work to come. Now, those taxpayer millions are peeling off and floating away in ragged, aquamarine chunks.
One version of this news story had already made its way to Jack Hier and Zoe Hodson, two Australian millennials traveling through D.C. on a road trip. At the foot of the Reflecting Pool, Hier said that he’d read an article claiming that a previous presidential administration had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the Reflecting Pool, but that Trump managed it for less than $10 million. (Sorry, mate— that’s false .) Looking out over the green sludge covered in cleaning equipment, speaking over the hum of the generators and the vacuums and the pumps, Hier smiled. “It looks great,…
Read the full article at Slate →
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