On the surface, Donald Trump’s obsession with renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a political problem for obvious reasons: The more the public expects the president to do real work on the challenges facing the public and the nation, the more the Republican fixates on personal distractions and vanity endeavors.

But the closer one looks at the no-bid contract for the dubious renovation project, the more one realizes that Trump’s tone-deaf crusade is a mess for multiple reasons.

According to the president’s initial claims, the handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the iconic pool. Two weeks ago, that price tag soared to $13.1 million. Last week, Trump said he thought the overall cost to American taxpayers would “probably” be “less than $20 million.”

It reached the point that the president insisted online that he wasn’t involved in choosing the contractor, whom he claimed he “did not know and have never used before.” He’d previously said the exact opposite, sparking questions as to which version of his contradictory story was true.

Last week, the overall story managed to get a little worse when The New York Times reported that the general manager of one of Trump’s golf clubs has helped with plans for the project, despite the inconvenient fact that he’s “a private citizen with no known training in engineering or architecture.”

This week, the burgeoning fiasco became even messier. The Times reported Wednesday that the no-bid contract, which circumvented federal procurement laws for dubious reasons, has also generated an inflated profit margin for the contractor whom Trump claimed to choose before changing his story. From the article:

A National Park Service analysis found that the contractor given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being paid an inflated and excessive profit margin, according to federal documents obtained by The New York Times.

That analysis, prepared by a Park Service contracting specialist, found that the typical profit margin of federal construction contracts like this one is 6 percent to 12 percent. But the firm fixing the Reflecting Pool, Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, submitted a bid that charged 20 percent, adding at least $850,000 to what a more typical contract would have cost.

According to the Times’ account, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, the contractor’s work is currently underway, though at least for now, the company has “not been able to perform one of the most critical parts of its repair job: sealing the gaps between the concrete slabs at the pool’s floor.”

A spokesperson for the Interior Department didn’t dispute any of the relevant details, though it argued that the costs were justifiable because of the need to “expedite the timeline” ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4.

In the meantime, however, it’s not at all clear how this became a top priority for the White House, whether the price tag will continue to climb, when the project will be completed, whether the gaps on the pool’s floor will be sealed, or whether we’ll ever learn the details of how exactly the administration chose to reward the contractor with this no-bid contract. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post No-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool reportedly shows inflated profit margin appeared first on MS NOW.

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