WASHINGTON — On a typical spring morning in D.C., the area around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool bustles with runners, photographers, tourists and families of ducks.
This Monday, however, the 2,030 foot-long pool sat completely empty, save for a smattering of construction vehicles, portable toilets and traffic cones. In one of the corners of the drained pool, workers stood in a cluster, spraying the bottom with what looked like blue paint.
“I honestly can’t tell what they’re doing right now,” said Laurie Collins, a lifelong D.C. resident who was taking pictures of the scene to update the nearly 180,000 followers of her Instagram account @dccitygirl. “The way it seems that they’re spraying this paint it’s probably going to take them a year to finish it.”
The pool is being resurfaced as part of President Trump’s efforts to reshape iconic parts of the city. He says the project will take one week and cost $2 million. The overhaul would turn the reflecting pool from its longtime gray hue to a swimming pool-like blue.
NPR has reached out to the National Park Service, which administers the National Mall, for more information about the timeline, cost and upkeep of the resurfacing, but did not hear back in time for publication.
Trump told reporters last Thursday that he is working with one of his best “pool builders” from his real estate development days to clean up the pool, fix some of its joints and resurface it with “industrial-grade” material in the color “American flag blue.”
Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
The following day, Trump shared photos on Truth Social of workers using paint rollers to coat the concrete in a vivid dark blue. When NPR visited on Monday, the shade looked more subdued — and workers had seemingly switched from paint rollers to sprayers.
Passersby peeked at the scene through holes in black tarps on the tree-lined walking paths, and some walked down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to take it in from above. Reactions were mixed: Some people welcomed the changes, while others dismissed them as a costly waste of time.
Jalisa Cater, a fifth-generation Washingtonian and professional tour guide, just wishes the renovations weren’t taking place during peak tourist season. She says some of her visitors, including that day’s group from Colorado, have been disappointed to see the pool in its current state.
“Even though we might not be happy about how the city looks, because of all the construction … especially stuff with the reflecting pool, at the end of the day it’s going to look beautiful,” she says.
The pool has needed renovations over the years
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
The reflecting pool was completed in the early 1920s, right after the opening of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s been the backdrop of plenty of historic moments, including presidential inaugurations and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
But the pool, built of asphalt and tile on extremely marshy soil, deteriorated considerably over the decades. It sank by 12 inches in some 90 years, and the water wasn’t circulating properly, requiring two to three refills annually.
It underwent major renovations between 2010 and 2012, funded by $34 million from an Obama-era economic stimulus package. The project addressed “water quality and watertightness issues” and also redesigned the pool to be “shallower and more aesthetically pleasing,” according to Sika USA, one of the firms involved.
But it wasn’t a perfect fix, according to the Department of the Interior. A budget report from the 2023 fiscal year, making the case for further renovations, says workers on the 2012 project installed the wrong size water system pipes, which have “continuously broken and failed due to soil pressure.”
The department said the pool was “losing a significant amount of water,” and needed 71 million gallons of additional water — more than 10 times its normal capacity — in 2019 alone. Water costs that year exceeded $1 million, it said, highlighting the need for further repairs.
Trump has been talking publicly about working with the secretary of interior on a bigger “fix” since at least November 2025, and announced such an undertaking on Truth Social earlier this month.
Then, at last week’s Oval Office event about a new drug pricing deal, he went on a 10-minute tangent about his plans for the pool.
Trump said he made the pool a priority after an unnamed friend of his visiting from Germany called it “filthy, disgusting … not representative of the country.” The pool typically gets a deep clean every spring.
Trump said the contractor talked him out of his initial color choice — turquoise “like in the Bahamas” — and into the more patriotically named hue. And he reiterated that his approach will take just a fraction of the time and cost that he had been quoted previously.
“So you can have a beautiful pool, and you’ll have it for July 4th, long before July 4th,” Trump said.
It’s one of many controversial projects in D.C.
The reflecting pool isn’t the only part of D.C.’s landscape that Trump aims to change.
He’s moving forward with plans to add an enormous triumphal arch to the National Mall, touting a two-year renovation of the Kennedy Center and fighting a legal battle over his proposed White House ballroom, among other things.
Many of his proposals have been challenged, both in court and in public comments, though approval boards packed with Trump allies have been swift to move them along.
Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in Washington, D.C., says the reflecting pool encapsulates the way Trump is treating D.C. “like it’s his personal country club.”
“The way that he’s dealing with Washington, D.C. is different from almost every other president … in that he is taking it as a very direct and personal role rather than going through the appropriate agencies and processes,” Flanagan says. “You get some pool guys and then they refinish it in a way that is more suitable to, basically, a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago.”
Collins, the D.C. influencer — wearing a baseball cap with the word “Democracy” on it — said Trump does not own the city and his approach to renovation “reeks of authoritarianism.”
“The city has improved in so many ways through my entire life and it only keeps getting better, but this is crazy, just crazy stuff going on that … is unnecessary and it’s not helping the American people,” she said.
Not everyone agrees. Will Martinez, who lives in Arizona but travels to D.C. multiple times a year for work, said he is thrilled to see the reflecting pool getting a makeover. He said that before, it “was green, it was ugly, it just didn’t reflect what we are as Americans.”
“I have a lot of international friends and colleagues and they make comments on how ugly America looked, especially D.C., and so this is hugely important for that,” he added.
