Interior Secretary Burgum unveils a Tom Fazio redesign of D.C.'s East Potomac Golf Links

On May 14, 2026, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum used his official social-media account to unveil a Tom Fazio design for the federal renovation of East Potomac Golf Links, a century-old District of Columbia municipal course built on a manmade peninsula in the Potomac River. The plan, prepared by Fazio Golf Design and Consulting, replaces the existing 36 holes with a par-72, 7,660-yard 18-hole layout, a practice facility, and a nine-hole short course — totalling 27 holes — and adds three new water features. Per Golf.com, the routing "bears no resemblance to the original Walter Travis design." Tom Fazio is President Donald Trump's longtime personal golf-course architect; he designed Trump National Golf Club Bedminster and has worked on four other Trump courses, and Trump and Burgum together will oversee the East Potomac redesign.

This is recorded under self-dealing and procurement-irregularities. A federally controlled public asset is being redesigned by the sitting president's longtime personal architect under an arrangement the federal government itself created: the Trump administration terminated the National Links Trust's 50-year lease covering East Potomac, Langston, and Rock Creek in December 2025, and in May 2026 the National Park Service announced a new structure under which an NPS-led group of public and private partners — not the NLT — would conduct "immediate renovations" at East Potomac. The publicly reported documents to date do not disclose the contractual mechanism by which Fazio Design was selected; Field Level Media reports only that Fazio "will be tapped" for the project, and neither Burgum's office nor Fazio responded to Golf.com's requests for further detail. The pattern — selection of the president's personal architect for a federally-controlled renovation, through a public-private structure that sits outside ordinary federal procurement, after the prior nonprofit operator's lease was terminated and partially restored only under court pressure — is the procurement irregularity the entry records; the precise instrument (no-bid award, sole-source procurement, contractor-of-partner relationship) remains to be established.

Local response was sharply critical. The advocacy group Save East Po posted that there had been "zero public input" and that "the DMV community that uses this place every day was never consulted," and criticized the reduction from 36 holes to 27. A watchdog suit challenging the public course's shutdown is pending. As with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool no-bid award recorded at issue-66-federal-procurement-irregularities, the corrective legal action is not itself the abuse; the entry records the underlying federal actions — the lease termination, the NPS-led partnership arrangement, and Burgum's unveiling of the Fazio design — under the lawsuit-filings-not-abuses doctrine.

Updates

2026-07-02 — Federal judge presses DOJ over East Potomac construction timeline [7, 8]

On July 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, presiding over the D.C. Preservation League's lawsuit against the renovation, pressed Justice Department attorneys for firmer assurances that construction would not begin before the litigation is resolved. Reyes cited President Trump's June 28 visit to the course -- during which course-design plans were displayed -- and his subsequent social-media statement that major construction would begin September 1, saying these indicated the administration was further along in its planning than had been publicly disclosed. Her May 2026 order already required the government to notify the court and obtain approval before major construction, cutting more than ten trees, or moving heavy machinery onto the site. Reyes gave the parties two weeks to negotiate language giving the court and plaintiffs advance notice before any construction begins, saying she did not want to learn "in the middle of the night" that bulldozers were on site. She made no formal ruling on the underlying case.

2026-07-18 — Oversight panels report no design plans as September groundbreaking nears; soil testing disclosed as incomplete [9, 10]

As of July 18, 2026, neither the National Capital Planning Commission nor the Commission of Fine Arts had received design plans for the renovation to review, and neither body meets in August — compressing any possible review before the administration's planned September 1 groundbreaking. Separately, in the D.C. Preservation League's pending suit, the administration disclosed to Judge Reyes that it had not finished testing the soil deposited on the course from the East Wing demolition before deeming it safe; Reyes responded by allowing plaintiffs to question administration officials under oath about the testing. Independent NPS testing had previously found elevated lead, chromium, arsenic, and mercury in the deposited debris, prompting 61 House Democrats to demand its removal in a June 27 letter.

2026-08-25 — NPS diverted emergency responders to DC beautification work [11, 12]

Nearly 300 members of the National Park Service's "incident management team" — the specialized unit that responds to wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other emergencies at parks nationwide, including in Alaska and California — were reassigned to Washington, D.C. to work on the administration's beautification projects, including debris cleanup at the East Potomac golf course and repairs to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to two Park Service employees and internal documents. The reassigned staff also compiled detailed status reports for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's office, which employees described as unusually hands-on involvement by a political appointee in operational scheduling details. The diversion came as the West faced one of its worst wildfire seasons in a decade. An Interior Department spokesperson told The Independent that incident management teams are used "for all sorts of things" and that "people were not pulled from the front lines of wildfires."