By MELISSA GOLDIN
In April, President Donald Trump announced a project to revamp the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hiring a contractor to coat its massive granite basin at a cost of what he said would be $1.5 million. He criticized his predecessors’ efforts to fix the site at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, claiming they spent “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Former President Barack Obama presided over a multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool, but the final bill was nowhere near Trump’s estimate. And the Biden administration did not conduct any major work. As for Trump, federal spending records show that costs are significantly higher than he says.
The reflecting pool, which is more than 2,000 feet long, was originally built in the 1920s. It sits between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and is one of the most iconic sites in Washington. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously gave his “I Have a Dream” speech there in 1963.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
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....
By MELISSA GOLDIN In April, President Donald Trump announced a project to revamp the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hiring a contractor to coat its massive granite basin at a cost of what he sa...