National Park Service awards $6.9M no-bid Reflecting Pool contract to a Trump-chosen firm

On April 3, 2026, the National Park Service awarded a $6.9 million contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a firm based in New Canton, Virginia, to reseal and waterproof the joints and slabs of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and to paint its basin the color President Donald Trump called "American flag blue." Contracting records show the company had never previously held a federal contract. Federal agencies are generally required by law to obtain competitive bids; the Park Service instead invoked an exemption reserved for urgent situations grave enough to threaten serious financial or other injury to the government. Administration officials made no public claim that such injury was likely, citing instead Trump's stated wish to complete the work before the July 4, 2026 celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary.

Trump said publicly that he handpicked the contractor, telling reporters he had consulted firms that worked on his private swimming pools and selected one he said had also done work at his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. The New York Times, which obtained internal government documents on the project, reported that it could not independently confirm the firm had worked for the golf club; the company advertises waterproofing of highway culverts, pipes, roofs and storage tanks rather than pool work, and one of its owners declined to comment. The documents indicate the cost has already more than tripled the roughly $2 million Trump had publicly promised, with internal Park Service estimates pointing to a final figure above $12 million — part of it to be covered by fees paid by national-park visitors. A George Washington University contracting-law scholar quoted by the Times said the urgency exemption is not meant for cases where the government is merely behind schedule, observing that "the government cannot create its own urgency." The Times found the Park Service had invoked urgency claims for less than 1% of its contract spending over the prior decade, and reported the same exemption was used to award other no-bid work, including a contract now worth $17.4 million to the firm that built Trump's White House ballroom.

The administration did not submit the project to the Commission of Fine Arts, the independent federal panel that has reviewed designs for monuments and memorials in Washington since 1910 and that reviewed the Reflecting Pool's last major renovation in 2010. On May 11, 2026, the Cultural Landscape Foundation sued the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in federal court, alleging the administration skipped a federal review required by the National Historic Preservation Act — a pending legal allegation rather than an adjudicated finding. The Interior Department has defended the contract, saying the Park Service chose the best available company to expedite the repair ahead of the anniversary celebrations. The Standing records this as an instance of procurement irregularity — a no-bid contract, awarded by suspending competitive bidding, steered to a vendor the president personally named — together with the bypassing of the customary federal design review, consistent with its broken-windows approach of documenting such actions regardless of their dollar value or eventual outcome.