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Good afternoon, and welcome back to Press Pass. The dog days of summer are almost upon us, and the midterm elections won’t be far behind. Keep your head cool during a hot time with a Bulwark+ membership. Not only will you get to enjoy a steady breeze of clear thinking and good reporting to keep your mental temperature down, but your membership will also directly support our independent journalism, which can help slow global political warming. Join our community at the link below.
Today’s edition brings you a different take on Trump’s sloppy Reflecting Pool restoration. Members of Congress who’ve claimed to uphold fiscal conservatism have completely abandoned the concept in recent decades. We all know that, of course—but the pool fiasco is a perfect case study of just how little they care. Dive into the ridiculous explanations for the gooey pool’s current state offered by the Senate’s best and brightest.
In addition, Mike Lee is on a one-man mission to get a bill passed. Unfortunately, he isn’t courting colleagues to bring them on side; he’s just posting his way through it. Lee’s efforts have now morphed into a public feud with his colleagues. Lastly, some online newsletters have added a new feature: informal matchmaking services. Maybe that’s in the cards for Press Pass, too. All that your lonely heart desires and more, below.
GOP Fiscal Hawks Turn Chicken On Reflecting Pool
This watery boondoggle is exactly the kind of thing they've criticized for years.
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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 would 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