David A. Fahrenthold

And so that means that later on, when they came to haggle over the final price, the pool was already partly underway.

The government has very little leverage to come back then and say, hey, listen, we're not going to pay the full price.

Would they really threaten to kick them off with the work partly done?

That's right.

The original due date for this project was May 22nd.

Now President Trump is saying the real deadline is July 4th.

Well, a lot of the pool's bottom is painted a dark shade of blue.

President Trump said that he had originally wanted to be turquoise like the Bahamas, but that the contractor that he had hired for this told him that it should be American flag blue.

And so American flag blue is what they've settled on.

Kind of a deep navy blue.

Yeah, it's a dark kind of blue, dark blue jean blue.

That is the color now of most of the pool.

It will be the final color of the entire pool.

And the question is, what will it look like when it is filled?

People that I've talked to, landscape architecture experts, say that it probably will not affect the reflectivity.

What makes it reflective is that it's shallow and it's dark, and it will still have both of those elements.

This case really embodies the risks of no-bid contracts, right?

Without knowing what other people would charge, without knowing how other people would have attacked these same problems, it's really hard to know if what they have here is the right solution, the best solution, the cheapest solution.

It's impossible to evaluate what else could have been done.

We only know what they have.