Lawsuit Targets Trump’s Reflecting Pool Makeover as Part of Wider D.C. ‘Beautification’ Push
A new federal lawsuit is asking a judge to halt President Donald Trump’s “American Flag Blue” makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, arguing that the project is illegal and permanently disfigures one of the country’s most important historic landscapes.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation and its president, landscape architect Charles Birnbaum, filed suit Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, saying the Interior Department and National Park Service began repainting the Reflecting Pool’s dark gray basin a vivid blue without required historic‑preservation and environmental reviews.
The complaint says the pool’s gray, achromatic basin is a character‑defining feature that was chosen a century ago to create a deep mirror image of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, and is specifically recognized as such in a 1999 National Park Service cultural landscape report.
According to the filing, workers started applying a bright blue industrial coating in mid‑April after Trump publicly promised to “fix” what he called Biden filth and incompetence at the site and to have the new look in place for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4.
The plaintiffs argue that repainting the basin will make the pool resemble a giant swimming pool rather than a solemn civic space and will dramatically and permanently alter visitors’ experience of the Lincoln Memorial grounds and the National Mall Historic District, both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
They are asking the court to order Interior to stop the work immediately, complete full reviews under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, and ultimately restore the pool’s historic materials and color.
The lawsuit claims the National Park Service treated the repainting as routine maintenance under a 2008 nationwide programmatic agreement, which lets the agency streamline minor in‑kind repairs. The plaintiffs say that the exception does not apply because the new “American Flag Blue” surface is starkly different from the existing and historic gray basin, and therefore triggers the full consultation process, including public notice and input and a formal assessment of adverse effects on the National Mall Historic District.
They also allege the government skipped any meaningful environmental review under NEPA, even though the project involves coating more than 300,000 square feet of basin surface with industrial paint in contact with millions of gallons of water.
The complaint says no plans, environmental documents or historic‑preservation findings have been posted on the Park Service’s Planning, Environment & Public Comment website, unlike the extensive documentation prepared for a previous rehabilitation of the Reflecting Pool in 2009.
In addition, the filing notes that the Commission of Fine Arts, long involved in design decisions around the Lincoln Memorial, was consulted on earlier projects at the site but has not been asked to review the blue repainting.
The repainting is one part of a broader effort by President Trump to remake the look of Washington under the banner of “beautification.”
At an April Oval Office event, Trump said he had worked with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and a contractor he praised as “unbelievable at doing swimming pools” to select the blue coating, saying he had first wanted a Bahamas‑style turquoise before settling on “American Flag Blue.”
News reports say the work is being done under a no‑bid federal contract worth about $6.9 million awarded to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a firm that previously worked on one of Trump’s golf properties, after the administration invoked an “urgent” exemption from normal procurement rules.
Trump has repeatedly argued that the gray stone floor of the pool “was never good” and that the project, which he has variously said would cost between a little over $1 million and nearly $2 million, will make the feature more beautiful than it did in 1922 when they built it.
Trump has also pushed an enormous triumphal arch, sometimes dubbed the “Arc de Trump,” about 250 feet tall, taller than both the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, planned for the capital as part of celebrations of the United States’ 250th anniversary. A Trump‑aligned Commission of Fine Arts has granted preliminary approval to the arch’s design.
In 2025, the White House pitched the new East Wing ballroom as a privately funded $200–250 million project, with Trump and aides insisting that wealthy donors and companies would cover the bill, not taxpayers.
Over the next year, Trump himself kept revising the projected cost upward, saying it could reach “something like $400 million,” and recently, the reconciliation process has the ballroom listed at $1 billion.
Trump has pushed a redesign of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to make it lighter and more in line with his preferred aesthetic, a project with costs estimated in the several‑million‑dollar range.
Trump has also moved to rebrand and heavily renovate cultural institutions, including plans to close and overhaul the Kennedy Center, renamed to include Trump’s name, for at least two years starting this summer.
Trump has framed all of these projects as part of a mission to restore what he calls the “beauty” of the nation’s capital, often describing Washington as dirty, unsafe and unworthy of its status as a world capital.
In budget documents, the White House has proposed a new “Presidential Capital Stewardship Program,” a $10 billion fund run through the National Park Service to coordinate targeted, priority construction and beautification projects in and around Washington, D.C. The $10 billion proposal is more than three times the Park Service’s entire annual budget and roughly two‑thirds of the service’s total maintenance backlog.
