As the Trump administration struggles to deal with the persistent green algae at the newly-renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a body of water just a mile and a half away remains clear.
The Capitol Reflecting Pool, located beneath Capitol Hill, has largely avoided the water-quality issues currently troubling the Lincoln Memorial site, Politico reported.
While the Lincoln Memorial pool has faced severe operational setbacks, including chemical treatments linked to bird deaths and a $14.7 million renovation bill, the Capitol pool is crystal clear, according to photos posted Thursday on social media.
The two National Mall sites operate under different jurisdictions: the Capitol pool is overseen by the Architect of the Capitol rather than the National Park Service, which manages the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial was finished in 1922 and the Capitol pool was completed in 1971. The latter’s smaller, trapezoidal design allows for a much faster maintenance cycle, Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin told Politico.
“I will not say that our full reflecting pool is without problems, because it certainly does have some issues,” Austin said. “It’s also smaller, so that’s part of it, too. And it was kind of formulated in different ways, so it’s kind of hard to compare apples to apples on this one.”
Austin drains, cleans and repairs the concrete basin of the Capitol pool over a single week each fall and occasionally in the spring. In comparison, draining and refilling the long, narrow Lincoln Memorial pool takes roughly a month.
Austin told the outlet that keeping any large water feature clean was an ongoing struggle.
“Anytime you have a water feature in general … they are beautiful, they’re amazing, but they’re problematic because they degrade faster over time than pretty much anything else you’re going to have,” Austin said. “They require pumps, require pipes — corrosion, animals, diseases, bacteria, algae. There’s a lot of things that go along with that.”
The contrast in water conditions has raised questions about the White House’s recent renovation tactics, which included coating the Lincoln Memorial pool’s floor with a blue rubberized finish and treating an algae bloom with highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Earlier this week, eyewitnesses reported seeing three dead ducks in the Lincoln Memorial water.
By Thursday, social media reports suggested the water was looking clearer at the Lincoln Memorial. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers also defended the project in a statement.
“Today, the Reflecting Pool is crystal clear and is reflecting perfectly,” Rogers said, describing the result as a feat “only an expert builder like Donald J. Trump could accomplish.”
The National Park Service managed the Capitol pool until 2011, when Congress transferred control to the Architect of the Capitol through a spending bill. That transfer canceled Park Service plans to build a shallower pool with an overnight draining mechanism.
Instead, the architect completed a $7.3 million overhaul to repair and clean the existing structure. The legislative agency even added custom ramps to help ducklings navigate the water, a project that drew brief criticism from fiscal conservatives in Congress.
The Capitol pool has faced its own biological issues in the past. Avian botulism killed at least two dozen ducks there in 2008 under Park Service management, and high temperatures caused an algae bloom in 2020.
Lawmakers responsible for oversight of the Capitol grounds have offered mixed reactions regarding the two operations.
“I want to thank the Architect of the Capitol for keeping it clear and keeping it clean,” Maryland’s Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Politico.
Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice, of Oklahoma, remarked that “size matters,” while Senator Martin Heinrich, from Maryland, pointed to the timeline of the White House project as the primary issue.
“I mean, anybody with an eighth-grade science class could have predicted that this was not going to go well,” Heinrich said.
