Trump says Obama and Biden spent 'hundreds of millions' on reflecting pool. They did not

In April, President Donald Trump announced a project to revamp the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hiring a contractor to coat its massive granite basin at a cost of what he said would be $1.5 million. He criticized his predecessors' efforts to fix the site at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, claiming they spent “hundreds of millions of dollars."

Former President Barack Obama presided over a multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool, but the final bill was nowhere near Trump’s estimate. And the Biden administration did not conduct any major work. As for Trump, federal spending records show that costs are significantly higher than he says.

-snip-

TRUMP: “The Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed. And we’ll be spending, you’ll give me a number, but I think it’s a very low number. It’s like in the number that we originally talked about.”

THE FACTS: This is false. The Obama administration spent at least $34 million on a massive, two-year reconstruction project that ended in 2012. No major repairs to the pool were done during the Biden administration. Trump has put the cost of the work on the pool at $1.5 million to $2 million, but records show that at least $14.8 million worth of contracts have been awarded for the project so far.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/fact-focus-trump-says-obama-184633426.html