GOP Fiscal Hawks Turn Chicken On Reflecting Pool

This watery boondoggle is exactly the kind of thing they've criticized for years.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos Getty, Shutterstock)

White House down

President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to spend $14 million to fix up the Reflecting Pool on Washington’s National Mall offers a perfect example of the selective fiscal conservatism that defines Republican governance. The president has made a massive show of the restoration effort, which was contracted out to a Trump-connected company that took on the project without needing to competitively bid for it. Within a week of the project’s completion, the fruits of the effort were plain to see: The pool was an Olympic regulation–sized petri dish of algae, hydrogen peroxide, adhesives, fragments of “American Flag Blue” coating, and at least one dead duck.

Unable to accept the possibility that his shoot-first, denounce-whatever-was-hit-later administration may have erred, Trump is now blaming the reflecting pool’s squalid conditions on vandalism, a subject on which he appears to have flip-flopped.

The pool now must be drained again for repairs, meaning even more taxpayer funds must be spent on it. So I spoke to some of the fiscal fauxhawks on Capitol Hill about this becoming a money pit. After all, isn’t this a good example of just the sort of willy-nilly government spending they ought to address?

They offered various answers, but all of them were careful to avoid the appearance of any criticism of the project.

“This is our nation’s capital,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told me. “Everything should look pristine.”

Tuberville, who was a forceful proponent of Trump’s anti-weaponization fund that would have compensated people who defiled the nation’s capitol on January 6¹ repeated the unfounded claims that vandals caused the pool to turn into an algae swamp.

“The people, they need to be arrested and jailed and throw the key away,” he said.

When I noted that there have not yet been arrests or evidence that the pool’s deterioration had resulted from vandalism, Tuberville quickly replied, “They’ve arrested people.”

Trump has claimed five individuals have been arrested so far in connection with the alleged Reflecting Pool sabotage. However, the Justice Department has said little about those arrests. “We’ve received only a handful of citations which we will review,” a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office told USA Today. Some individuals detained for interacting with the Reflecting Pool have said they were targeted for simply touching pieces of pool flooring that had floated to the surface.

So far, no evidence has been produced by the administration to corroborate the president’s vandalism claims. There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the pool’s problems have natural origins. The new flooring’s color likely increased the heat of the shallow pool, creating ideal conditions for an algae bloom, and the copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide—a potent oxidizer—poured into the pool to combat the algae could have helped loosen the peeling flooring in the process, among other factors. The pool also has longstanding structural problems that were not addressed by the recent application of the new coating, and which have made algae blooms in the pool a recurring headache over many years.

Still, Tuberville was adamant that there had been something foul-smelling at play. “I don’t think they’d arrest people just to be arrested,” he told me.

But what about the way this money has been spent? Surely the self-professed penny-pinchers on the Hill wouldn’t be so blithe about that, right? Right?

“Well, I think getting the reflecting pool looking beautiful again is a good thing,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who has taken repeated opportunities to demand fiscal responsibility from the federal government, including DOGE cuts and rescission packages.

I noted that it did not look very beautiful at the moment.

“No, it doesn’t look very beautiful,” Daines said, laughing. “We gotta find out what went wrong with it; [it] needs to be corrected. It’s a great part of the experience coming down to the Mall.”

But the most surprising answer about the pool’s costs came from Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), one of the more mild-mannered and genuine conservatives on Capitol Hill. He insisted the restoration project was not on his radar.

“I have no way to be able to answer that,” Lankford said. “But we do need to fix it, but I have no way to answer that. I’ve not been tracking that.”

Routine partisanship aside, Lankford’s position struck me as especially odd because it’s just the sort of thing he’s spent much of his congressional career tracking as a tenacious opponent of wasteful federal spending.

For context, when Lankford arrived in the Senate, he succeeded former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the godfather of the conservative austerity approach to government programs. During his time in Congress, Coburn published an annual “wastebook” detailing the most peculiar and questionable ways in which the federal government allocates taxpayer dollars. Lankford and Coburn were sympatico on this issue, and the former has carried his predecessor’s wastebook torch forward since, renaming the report “Federal Fumbles.”

This report has frequently scrutinized projects just like the Reflecting Pooldoggle. For starters, in his most recent Federal Fumbles, which he posted this February, Lankford characterized several grants as misuses of federal funds, including projects that were much less expensive than the reflecting pool restoration effort.

“Despite growing concerns about US dependence on China for critical drug development and biomedical research, NIH paid a Chinese laboratory $124,000 to conduct drug experiments on up to 300 beagles per week,” the report states. That’s two orders of magnitude below the cost of Trump’s Reflecting Pool restoration so far.

In a 2015 edition of Federal Fumbles, produced when Lankford was a freshman senator, he lambasted federal property acquisitions being prioritized over properly maintaining its existing lands and monuments, citing the National Mall’s poor conditions as an example of how the government “has completely lost the ability to care for the lands it already controls.”

“Even right in Congress’s front yard, the water conveyance system on the National Mall is a ‘dilapidated and complex network of water lines’ that was ‘installed by the War Department of the early 1900s,’” Lankford wrote.

In theory, Lankford could argue that the cost of restoring the Reflecting Pool was already quite large and that even if Trump had done everything above board, it would have been a serious burden for the taxpayer to bear. But Lankford’s previous Federal Fumbles reports also were critical of the use of no-bid contracts, something Trump explicitly has used for the pool’s restoration and clean up. In 2016, when Barack Obama was president, Lankford wrote that a fair bidding process “can help save taxpayer money while also ensuring the government receives the best product.”

Lankford apparently has no thoughts about this now. His weak parry points to a much larger and well-attested political reality: Professional Republicans rarely engage in genuine fiscal conservatism when they’re the ones in power. Consider the explosions of high debt approvals under Republican presidents, or DOGE’s inability to decrease government spending despite tearing up various federal programs. The scummed-over Reflecting Pool captures this issue in perfect microcosm.

Magic Mike

There isn’t a single human being in the Senate who wants to pass the SAVE America Act more than Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). Unfortunately for Lee, he is not advocating for the voter suppression bill very effectively.

Lee has insisted on using a tool called the “talking filibuster” to get around the chamber’s rule requiring all legislation outside of executive nominations and reconciliation (special budget-related packages) to garner at least 60 votes to advance. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has dismissed the talking filibuster concept as both unrealistic and risky because it would hand over significant control of the floor to Democrats.

Typically, a senator trying to drum up support for a piece of legislation will work behind the scenes to construct trade-offs with other lawmakers and assuage skeptical senators’ concerns about their bill. Lee hasn’t done any of that. His strategy has instead centered on his X account, which he’s used to attack colleagues for disagreeing with him about his bill.

Replying to a post of a floor speech by Thune, Lee posted, “Cool. Let’s pass the SAVE America Act now. As I’ve been asking you to do for months, please bring it up now and announce that we will debate it until it passes.”

Asked about Lee’s posting habits, Thune told a reporter on Tuesday, “It’s his prerogative to communicate how he wants to communicate. But at the end of the day, I have to deal with reality. And sometimes the alternate universe that is X doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground.”

Not many senators have criticized Lee publicly for his posting, but a few have done so more freely in recent weeks. Since losing his primary for re-election, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has engaged Lee several times on his home-turf (the internet).

In response to a pro–SAVE Act user asking him whether President Lyndon Johnson would dismiss a critical bill for simply lacking the votes, Cornyn wrote:

No, you are correct. But he wouldn’t just hand a cudgel to his political opponents. He would do the “hard work” and get the votes! That is how you pass legislation; not by creating unrealistic expectations; not by criticizing your own party leaders; not by creating a circular firing squad. That helps Democrats.

Cornyn has also posted fact checks of Lee’s claims about the SAVE Act’s viability and even called out Lee directly, writing, “You don’t have the votes. [Thune] can’t change that. It is math.”

On Tuesday, another Republican Senator on the way out—Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined the pile on. “I never speak ill of members when they want to be professional and they want to engage in a productive way, but when you do some of the bullshit he’s done on social media, that’s why he gets these comments out here,” Tillis said of Lee. He called the talking filibuster idea, “goofy.”

Lee launched his X alter ego, “Based Mike Lee”—where he regularly insults colleagues, falls for fake news, and engages with bots—in July of 2022. Coincidentally, June of 2022 is the last time a bill authored by Lee was signed into law.

The vow

Widely read newsletters have apparently been undergoing some gain-of-function research. Some of them have become hubs for singles hoping to get hitched.

Anna Holmes writes in the Atlantic:

Fulton is the publisher of a year-old Substack newsletter called The Eastside Rag, which focuses on the goings-on in a collection of L.A. neighborhoods, including the trendy Silver Lake, the upscale Los Feliz, and the quickly gentrifying Atwater Village and Highland Park. He returns to certain scenes, themes, and characters again and again—celebrity sightings at Canyon Coffee (Echo Park), the sex appeal of the delivery guys at the east-side restaurant Bub and Grandma’s (Glassell Park), sales at the hipster apparel store Mohawk. What he wasn’t expecting, when he began his project, was that he would also become a relationship matchmaker—and that his newsletters featuring personals would become subscriber catnip (his readers now number in the thousands). . . .

Newsletter “dating,” such as it is, tends to feel both more grassroots and more curated than the newspaper-based personal ads of yore. People’s profiles are chosen by someone whom readers view as a vetted, trusted individual. They also read less like advertisements and more like a careful introduction.

Read the whole article, and if you’re a single Press Pass reader open to mingling with other Press Pass readers, say so in the comments. Other Congress-obsessed singles could be waiting at their keyboards for a chance to reply. Honestly, you would deserve each other. I mean that in a good way, of course; never settle.

1. He drew the line at compensation for those who assaulted officers that day.