Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.
The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.
“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.
“Quite green,” remarked another.
A woman visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, told me she just hopes it’s fixed in time for America’s 250th birthday on July 4: “We came and expected it to be blue, and we’re like, What is all this green junk in there?”
It’s a question that has ignited internet memes and conspiracy theories, posing the latest political Rorschach test to a divided nation. A not insignificant number of federal workers have now been mobilized to fight the green junk and answer questions about whether the green junk is under control. After the morning doses of hydrogen peroxide came the midday deployment of half a dozen National Park Service workers in bright-yellow vests, many with long-poled contraptions that they swept through the water. “Is that … a vacuum?” a passing man wondered aloud. Yes, he was told. It is a vacuum.
By evening, the situation had escalated: Workers strapped on waders, grabbed handfuls of tubing, and got in the pool. Generators hummed; water pumped; workers scraped. By dusk, some areas—though by no means all—had transformed to a hopeful shade of teal. Aerial views, as some noted, made it look like a painting by the abstract artist Mark Rothko.
So it’s come to this: A nation launched on the Founding Fathers’ grand dreams about democracy—one that survived a civil war and foreign attacks, that endured depressions and recessions and assassinations—is celebrating its semiquincentennial by watching to see whether we can clean the water in a century-old concrete pool. Even a stone-faced Abraham Lincoln is looking on.
Trump’s second term has been all about attempting tasks big and small that presidents before him failed to accomplish—or never thought of in the first place. That includes his pledge to freshen the water in the Reflecting Pool, an issue that has bedeviled administrations for decades. In April, he announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner. A blue one. To complete the project before July 4, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. “This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people,” Trump explained on Truth Social on June 5. “The material is thick, strong, flexible, and has a natural, beautiful color, the dark blue of the American Flag!”
But it didn’t take long for the algae to reappear.
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The cloudiness of the pool has triggered a predictable descent into polarizing politics: Some Trump supporters have claimed that the water isn’t actually green, and others have suggested there’s some outside force trying to undermine the pool renovation—and, by extension, Trump himself. Fox News dispatched the producer Johnny Belisario to the National Mall to interview tourists and mock anyone critical of the project. “And the Democrats, they’re going to tell you, Oh, there’s green algae; it looks soooo bad,” he said. “But there’s pool guys cleaning it up right now. No other president would do that.”
Grant Stinchfield, a conservative host on the Real America’s Voice network, made his own trip to the pool and concluded that the water was, in fact, green—but he found that fact suspicious and decided to do some investigating. He interviewed a woman who noticed that the water at the nearby World War II memorial was fine. “I feel like it’s sabotage!” Stinchfield concluded. “Is it nefarious? I tend to think so. You wouldn’t have so much algae that you see in here—you would not have that that quickly unless somebody did something. I’m telling you! I think they want Trump to fail so badly that they’ll come out here and do anything.”
I took it upon myself to clear up any murkiness by speaking with some of the country’s foremost experts on algae. They were in universal agreement: There’s no conspiracy. All of this was utterly predictable. Trump undertook this transformation during the hottest part of the year, when algae flourishes, and he made the cement dark blue, which retains even more heat, turning the shallow pool into an algae incubator.
“Algae, particularly blue-green algae, like it hot. So this time of year is their optimal growth period. It’s sort of Biology 101,” Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, told me. “This is not rocket science.” Don Anderson, the director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me that the shallow water in warm weather created the perfect conditions for algae to flourish, and he’s baffled why no one appeared to anticipate that, either by using water with fewer of the nutrients that help algae grow, or by sealing the system to prevent residual algae from seeping back into the pool. “This is a pretty simple system to control,” he said. “It’s the same idea as keeping a swimming pool clean, but it’s much larger.”
It would have been better to do a project like this one in the fall or winter. As it is, Paerl said he was doubtful that the situation could be reversed. Hydrogen peroxide is one option, he said, but it is expensive to use effectively in a 4-million-gallon pool. In warm weather, multiple applications and enormous quantities may be required. Climate change, he noted, has made these problems only more acute.
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“I think we’re just going to have to appreciate that it’s green right now,” he told me. “And it’ll turn blue later. And hopefully the algae blooming in there are not toxic.” Oh yes, there’s a chance this situation gets even worse. The experts I spoke with were uncertain what species of algae has been growing in the pool but warned that some could be harmful to pets and other animals if they drink it, especially when it’s laced with hydrogen peroxide. And that hydrogen peroxide? It may be killing the algae, causing them to release pigments that make the water more blue, but not without side effects. “When you get dead algae in water, there’s lots of other problems. It can get stinky,” Paerl told me. “It sounds like a horror story that never ends. But it will, in the winter, when the water cools.”
Again, all of this was avoidable, Wayne Carmichael, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Wright State University, told me. “The rush to get it done combined with not using a company that understood pool-water management, plus a serious injection of political hubris, allowed the bloom to happen,” he said.
The stink over the Reflecting Pool happens to coincide with a congressional fight over reauthorization of the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act. (Yes, really.) Some scientists hope they can use the new petri dish on the Mall as part of their lobbying campaign, but concern is also simmering that the fight against the kind of algae that can harm drinking water, fisheries, and tourism—a topic that has enjoyed bipartisan support—may now enter the political vortex.
No one wants to take responsibility for this money-sucking algae bloom. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—told me his company is not at fault because they were “only responsible for the installation of a waterproof liner.” Representatives from Green Water Solutions—that is the actual name of the company—which provided the $1.7 million nanobubbling system, did not respond to requests for comment. That system is supposed to inject nanobubbles containing the powerful oxidant ozone that can kill algae and break down the organic material they have produced, including their toxins. One of the experts, Anderson, told me that the product can be effective but isn’t in all situations, making this particular project “a very expensive trial.”
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The Department of Interior blamed the Obama administration for an earlier renovation “that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions, only to be broken and disgusting days later.” In a lengthy response to my questions, the department’s press team stated that the National Park Service is properly maintaining the Reflecting Pool. “Due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak,” they wrote in a statement. “We thank President Trump for fixing the Reflecting Pool for good.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said that the new lining “will permanently seal the Reflecting Pool, which previously leaked 16 million gallons per year and wasted countless taxpayer dollars.” Given some time, Rogers suggested, the color will improve: “A high-tech nanobubble ozone technology will be deployed to kill the algae and keep the Reflecting Pool crystal clear.”
Steve Padler, a Washington local who was watching the cleanup operation, told me he empathized with a problem that has vexed several presidents. But he’s frustrated that the Trump administration spent such an “absurd” amount of money trying to find a quick fix to a problem not so easily solved. “It looks like it did before,” he said. “It’s green.”
One of the workers vacuuming the water yesterday told me that he thought their efforts were having an impact, having noticed a difference in the small corner he was working on. Aerial views showed some progress along the edges of the pool, and Reuters launched a livestream for those wanting to watch in real time. Meanwhile, tourists as well as locals are now coming to check out the latest Washington attraction, which reflects not the majesty of the Mall but something more humbling: how clumps of aquatic plant matter foiled the wishes of the most powerful man in the world. And how the president who said he’d drain the swamp has instead created the conditions for a new one.