Here’s the situation: Trump vowed to paint the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” and spent $14 million on a renovation. Just a day after the basin was refilled, workers were already seen cleaning out clumps of algae, and by Friday, the algae was back.
The administration’s response is chef’s kiss (there’s always a chef’s kiss during this administration): Interior Department spokesperson Katie Martin told CNN the algae was due to “residual algae” from supply lines dormant during construction, adding: “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden.”
Thanks, Obama!
“Versus previous administrations, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told the New York Post.
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface,” the spokesperson added.
The kicker? Algae has been a recurring problem for the Reflecting Pool since Obama’s administration spent $34 million on a renovation in 2012 — which also resulted in algae growth, causing the National Park Service to drain the pool. And per the Interior Dept’s own spokesperson, the algae bloom has “plagued every pool reopening since 1922.”
So Trump spent $14 million, it turned green in 48 hours, and they blamed Obama for a problem that’s been happening for over a century. The nanobubbler is the apparent hero of this story, though the algae didn’t get that memo.
Trump blamed Obama and Biden previously, so the Associated Press did a fact check in late May. The claim from 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.
As for Biden, “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,” the outlet reporte. “He said that the pool was cleaned annually during Biden’s term to manage algae buildup.”