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.

The Standing records this 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.