Multiple residents of Washington, D.C. told CNN Friday their unfiltered thoughts on President Donald Trump’s $14 million restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool – and the feedback was scathing.
“It looks bad!” one D.C. resident told CNN’s Tom Foreman. “I just see green – green slime.”
Trump’s restoration of the Reflecting Pool has been just one of many of his D.C. beautification projects. It’s proven controversial given that the Trump administration handed the project to a contractor with ties to the president in a no-bid deal, bypassing what critics say should have been a competitive bidding process.
After the completion of the $14 million renovation project, blue paint from the pool’s bottom appears to have peeled off, and the pool’s water has turned a deep green – as experts predicted it would last month.
Federal workers have attempted to combat the growing algae by pouring peroxide into the pool, though as of Friday, it's largely had no effect.
“Pouring all that peroxide into it clearly didn't help,” another D.C. resident told CNN. “I feel for the ducks.”
Foreman told CNN’s John Berman that, after walking around the pool’s rim “over and over again” Friday, there were “very few places where you can see” any blue “at all.”
“Those people behind you, they're just vacuuming full time?” Berman asked Foreman about federal workers seen wading in the pool with suction equipment. “Is this going to be a permanent thing, people standing in the pool vacuuming?”
Foreman said, “There were more than a dozen of them out here all day long yesterday doing just that, working steadily to try to clear it. What is here is kind of what was here before in the eyes of many people passing by and about as bad as it's ever been.”
"I feel for the ducks"
DC residents give scathing reviews of Trump's $14M Reflecting Pool restoration pic.twitter.com/l0lyIFUOpF
— Alexander Willis (@ReporterWillis) June 19, 2026