Day after day, President Donald Trump crowed about his success, saying he had achieved something his predecessors could not. Then, the illusion snapped. The project fell apart. Things were not better; if anything, they’re worse off than before. The cut corners and headlong rush yielded a temporary thrill for the president and a waste of taxpayer money.
I’m referring to Trump’s very expensive and rapidly unraveling attempts to overhaul the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, though the description could apply to many issues from the Trump presidency. My colleague Ja’han Jones described the once-again-algae-coated site as “a physical swamp that serves as a potent metaphor for [the Trump] administration’s corruption and incompetence.” The hastily done renovation and its swift demise are simply the most recent example of a pattern in which Trump and his allies’ bold declarations collapse under the pressures of time, scrutiny and common sense.
The cut corners and headlong rush yielded a temporary thrill for the president and a waste of taxpayer money.
For weeks, Trump has hyped the Reflecting Pool project alongside his other beautification side hustles. He’s blamed his predecessors, particularly Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for not fully fixing the pool’s many issues. Over the course of several weeks, the pool was drained and repainted, with a layer of sealant applied to prevent the leaks that have plagued the pool for years. The Trump administration gave a $14 million no-bid contract to a firm that worked on pools at one of Trump’s golf clubs. (The firm is also reportedly owned by a Trump donor and, according to a government analysis, did so at an “inflated” profit margin.)
The intention was to have the Washington landmark looking better than ever (or at least more Trumpian) in time for events surrounding America’s 250th birthday. Instead, the pool’s shallow surface is coated in more algae than has been seen there in years, The Washington Post reports. Videos taken Friday showed the “American Flag Blue” paint that Trump bragged about already peeling away. The speedy devolution of the vaunted project could have been doomed from the start or it may have been helped along by the hydrogen peroxide used last week to help kill the algae clusters that had already formed.
The Trump administration blamed the algae’s return on residual amounts remaining in the pipes while the renovation was underway. When the blooms continued and the coating began to peel, the president accused “Radical Left Wing Lunatics” of using chemicals in the Reflecting Pool “to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work.” As ever, the real fault must have laid with anyone but Trump. But there’s no such excuse for the many other examples of administration hubris that have ended in the same fashion.
Last year, Trump’s pal Elon Musk — who recently became the world’s first trillionaire — led an effort to slash billions of dollars in federal spending. Musk’s DOGE project was empowered in large part by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has long sought to shrink the federal workforce. Both men framed their slash-and-burn efforts as ridding the government of unnecessary bloat, which nobody had had the courage to do before.
Instead, within months, the mass layoffs proved to have deeply impacted vital work. For example, the Internal Revenue Service was forced to rehire staffers only weeks after forcing them out of their roles. The result wasn’t enough to prevent a drop in revenue reported last year as the IRS lost a good chunk of its enforcement capabilities.
Hayes Brown
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.