David A. Fahrenthold

Okay.

The pool has three main problems.

The water leaks out between the concrete slabs.

There are pipes that connect the pool to its filtration system, which is behind us here a few hundred yards away.

Those pipes often break and leak, which means they have to shut everything down or else the water just leaks out into the ground.

And then at the filtration site, there's also a need for a better filter because algae blooms makes the water green and matted and ugly and actually makes it impossible to reflect in some cases.

So lots of administrations have tried over the years to fix those problems.

So President Trump, in his first term, started thinking about, how do I fix the problems of the reflecting pool?

And what we're seeing now is that in his second term, he's actually trying to make those repairs happen.

Here's what's odd about what the Trump administration is doing.

They are doing two of the three things that needed to be done before.

They're trying to fix the leaky joints between the concrete slabs.

Another contract, not done by this company, is putting a new filtration system in.

But they're not doing one key piece, which is they're not fixing the pipes that connect the pool with that filtration system.

And if those don't get fixed and they continue to leak, then the algae problem could recur because you're not getting the water to the place where it's clean.

It's a great question.

That was the plan starting in the first Trump administration through Biden.

The plan was to do all three of those things.

Seal the pool, fix the pipes, fix the filtration.

Somewhere this year, the fix the pipes thing got put on the shelf.