National Park Service gave Trump donor's firm a second no-bid contract months after its Tijuana River pilot failed

On April 3, 2026, the National Park Service awarded a $1.7 million no-bid contract to Greenwater Services, also known as Green Water Solutions, to install an ozone-based "nanobubble" filtration system meant to control algae at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Federal contracting records list the company's owner as the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by John J. Cafaro, an Ohio businessman who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump and Trump-aligned committees — including $250,000 to the Trump Victory committee in 2020 and $100,000 in 2024, per FEC records reviewed by Newsweek — and who owns a home near Mar-a-Lago. The Park Service invoked the same "unusual and compelling urgency" exemption it used that same day to award a separate $6.9 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to reseal and repaint the pool's basin, both justified by the goal of finishing before the nation's 250th-anniversary events on July 4, 2026 (that contract is recorded separately in this archive as federal-procurement-irregularities-706c784f).

The Reflecting Pool award was Greenwater's second no-bid federal contract. About a year earlier, the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission had hired the company, also without competitive bidding, to pilot the same nanobubble technology in the sewage-contaminated Tijuana River. That pilot began in September 2025 and was cut short in October 2025 when a storm flooded the river, scattering Greenwater's rental equipment and spilling diesel fuel into the waterway. Oscar Romo, executive director of the river-restoration nonprofit Alter Terra, who has worked the river for more than 40 years, told MS NOW the project made conditions worse — the smell "became even worse" and there was "no improvement or satisfactory results" — and said Greenwater ignored his storm warnings while employees touted the company's relationship with President Trump. Greenwater's final report and an International Boundary and Water Commission news release nonetheless called the pilot successful; Wen Zhang, an engineering professor who has studied nanobubble treatment for over a decade, told MS NOW that open river systems like the Tijuana require far more rigorous evaluation than the technology had received before deployment.

Interior spokeswoman Katie Martin said Greenwater was "selected because they had the expertise, workforce and materials" and that the White House played no role in the selection. Cafaro has said Trump "doesn't know a thing about" the Reflecting Pool work and that he asked the Park Service to open the contract to bidding before being told no other company offered the technology. This is recorded as procurement irregularity and pay-to-play: a second no-bid contract, justified by a government-set deadline rather than genuine emergency, steered to a longtime presidential donor's company without regard to the documented failure of that company's only prior real-world deployment of the same technology.

Updates

2026-06-10 — Algae recurred in pool despite Greenwater's nanobubble system [7]

Within days of the pool's refill following the broader renovation, algae reappeared in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; by June 10, 2026 — one day after refilling — workers were again seen vacuuming clumps of algae from the repainted basin, and the bloom returned again by June 14 despite an Interior Department claim that Greenwater's ozone "nanobubble" system was "actively killing" it. The Washington Post reported June 18 that the recorded algae levels were among the highest for that month in five years, echoing the disputed-results pattern from Greenwater's earlier Tijuana River pilot.