Doug Burgum bet his credibility on a lie about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and lost

For six weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the country that vandals gutted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He said it on CNN. He said it on Fox. He said it was caught on camera and backed by eyewitnesses. Then, on July 31, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office told a federal judge the opposite: the pool’s failure was a construction defect, and Burgum’s own department had known this for weeks.

On June 11, a National Park Service engineer emailed the Reflecting Pool contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, warning that the new liner was already peeling, the result of what the engineer called “overspray,” a contractor error. Three weeks later, on July 5, Burgum sat across from CNN’s Dana Bash and insisted the opposite. “It didn’t peel off,” he said. “There was vandalism. There was box cutters.” He said the same thing on “The Katie Miller Podcast” and on X, describing a 350-foot gash he was “100 percent sure” was intentional.

Pirro’s office says Burgum’s Interior department sat on the June 11 email and didn’t hand it over until after prosecutors had already secured a grand jury indictment against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who the Trump administration was trying to blame for the peeling. By the time Interior turned over the email, Hearn had been arrested, charged with a felony, and dragged through weeks of public accusations for a crime that he didn’t commit. Pirro dropped the case, but Burgum refused to drop his story. Just days ago, he posted on X that “the evidence is clear” and accused deranged vandals of destroying a national monument, the same day that Pirro’s department told a federal judge this was untrue.

Burgum has now backed himself into a corner trying to defend the $16.4 million his department spent on the botched project. Interior awarded a $14.7 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia firm with a history of working on Trump properties, by declaring the repaint job “urgent” under a federal rule meant for genuine emergencies. A separate $1.7 million no-bid contract went to Green Water Solutions for algae treatment before the pool was even refilled.

A Center for Western Priorities analysis of federal contracting data found this spending to be far out of the ordinary. In the first 522 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, the National Park Service obligated $21.2 million through “urgent and compelling” no-bid contracts, the legal exception meant for emergencies that can’t wait for a bidding process—like a burst water main at Big Bend or hazardous-material cleanup after the Dragon Bravo wildfire near the Grand Canyon. The two Reflecting Pool contracts alone accounted for $16.4 million of that, or 77 percent of the total.

“For years, ‘urgent’ at the Park Service meant what it’s supposed to mean: a broken water line, a failed generator, a wildfire cleanup that can’t wait for paperwork,” said CWP Executive Director Aaron Weiss in June. “Doug Burgum decided that repainting the Reflecting Pool was an emergency, skipped the competitive bidding process that could have raised red flags over the rush job, and turned the National Mall into a giant green mess just in time for America’s birthday.”

Burgum had two options once the liner started failing. He could have said his department erred in hiring a contractor hand-picked by Trump and taken responsibility for flushing $16 million down the drain. Instead, he let the Justice Department build a criminal case against an innocent man.

What happens next matters for the future of public lands. Burgum runs an agency that oversees the management of about 550 million acres, or 20 percent of the total land in the United States. Now we know he was lying about the Reflecting Pool, so why should we believe what he says about drilling, national parks, or endangered species? How can the thousands of employees at Interior department agencies carry out their duties to the American people if they are being led by a liar who is willing to railroad an innocent man in order to appease the president?

For now, Trump and Burgum are still aligned in continuing to lie about the Reflecting Pool. Instead of firing Burgum for embarrassing the administration and lying to the American people, Trump has turned his anger on Pirro for telling the truth. That tracks with a Trump administration pattern in which blind loyalty is rewarded over integrity. As CWP’s Aaron Weiss put it back in June: “The Trump administration operates at the intersection of malice and incompetence. Doug Burgum embodies that more than any other cabinet member. Botching a paint job then arresting scapegoats to cover up his failures should be more than enough to cost Burgum his job.”

For Burgum, the Reflecting Pool was a test of whether he would tell the public the truth when the facts were inconvenient. He didn’t, and there is no reason to expect he will next time.

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