David A. Fahrenthold

They say now they might do it in the fall, but it's not happening now.

And until that gets done, what people we've talked to said, it's not a permanent fix.

And we see in Park Service documents that the Park Service says, you know, our own people didn't come up with this plan to fix the pool.

The person who came up with it is a guy named David S., an administration advisor.

Who is David S.?

If you look in other documents related to this contract, you see that a guy named David Schutzenhofer, who's the general manager of Trump's golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, was advising the Park Service on this job, was helping connect them with other vendors.

We don't know for sure that he is the same David S., but

You see that the origins of this whole idea, the whole plan for fixing this pool, have come from outside the Park Service.

And it was an idea they hadn't even considered before.

So that gives you a sense of how kind of out of the box this solution is.

It's charging right now $13.1 million.

That is notable because it's also different than President Trump first described.

He originally said this contract would cost $1.8 million.

It's now obviously seven times that.

And do we know why?

This contract is as large as it is in part because the company is charging 20 percent for overhead and then 20 percent more for profit.

Now, we've seen Park Service documents that show that even within the Park Service, people believe that those two percentages, 20% and 20%, were excessive and inflated.

The Park Service is paying them anyway, in part because they're on a very quick timeline.

The government wanted this work done so badly that it actually told them to start work before they'd agreed on a price tag.

Wow.