If you thought the Reflecting Pool was a disaster............

Fore! Trump’s DC Golf Course Is Already in the Rough

If you thought the Reflecting Pool was a disaster, wait until they try to build this.

Stephanie Mencimer

When President Donald Trump takes flight on Marine One from the White House, he often gets a bird’s-eye view of a municipal golf course located at East Potomac Park, a national park better known to locals as Hains Point. Perhaps the flyovers inspired his recent ambitions to transform the beloved local links into a world-class golf course worthy of PGA tournaments.

Trump recently said construction on the new course will begin September 1. But his aerial view of this particular building site may obscure one of the park’s key features: Its water hazard. 

Water from the Potomac River floods its sidewalks and drowned the city’s dreams of a modern swimming facility. Now, it threatens to wash out Trump’s golf fantasy and leave behind a disaster that will make the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool look like a minor embarrassment.

The “builder in chief” first publicly mused in May about remaking the East Potomac links. A month later, he toured the site with golf course designer Tom Fazio and announced on Truth Social that after “studying the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” he had concluded that “on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of DC’s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”

In June, Fazio told Golf.com that Trump would move quickly to complete the course before he leaves office. “The president happens to be a guy of action,” Fazio said. “He wants to get it done now.”

“The president happens to be a guy of action. He wants to get it done now.”

Of course, any local with a fishing pole could have pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in his plans. “Let’s be honest,” says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which has sued the Trump administration over its plans for the golf course. “The island is sinking.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers created the 330-acre East Potomac Park in the late 19th century from a hodgepodge of material dredged up from the bottom of the Potomac River to widen shipping channels around the city. In 1897, Congress declared the artificial island a public park that would be “forever held and used for recreation and the pleasure of the people.” In 1917, park officials hired the legendary architect Walter Travis to design a public golf course, which opened in 1920. It was wildly popular, and in 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Unlike the excess of cost and amenities at Trump’s private courses, golf at the no-frills East Potomac is cheap—an 18-hole round on the blue course costs as little as $41, less for kids, veterans, and seniors. In 2025, people played more than 125,000 rounds of golf at the municipal facility. It’s not the sort of course Trump would ever actually play. But the park’s tantalizing views of Washington’s monuments and undeveloped riverfront must seem like so much wasted potential to the billionaire developer.

The environmental realities of East Potomac, however, present some major obstacles for fulfilling Trump’s vision. Ed Stierli, Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, says when he saw the early renderings of Trump’s course, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?”

The simple answer is yes. Much of East Potomac lies at sea level within a 100-year floodplain, and various studies have found that the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its inception. Meanwhile, the water level around it has risen more than two feet thanks to climate change and other contributors. Today, it’s not uncommon for the river to top the seawall and come up 25 feet inland after a big storm or high tide, leaving picnic tables marooned like rafts on a small lake. (The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Good grief,” said Mark Mungeam, the president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, who is familiar with Trump’s plans but was unaware of the extent of the sinking. “That speaks to the folly of this project.”

In June, I biked down to East Potomac to meet DC resident Alex Rosen, who recently founded the community group Save East Po to fight Trump’s golf course. While we talked, the sidewalk flooded as the tide came in. “There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water,” Rosen said. “It’s a common occurrence.”

“There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water.”

The regular flooding, along with years of underfunding and neglect by Congress, has taken its toll. The nearly 150-year-old seawall that surrounds East Potomac Park is crumbling. The sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long peninsula is in many places falling into the river and has been fenced off— unusable.

For years, Republicans in Congress have starved all national parks for funding, creating a backlog of more than $2 billion in needed repairs just in DC. But in 2020, it passed the Great American Outdoors Act to try to address the neglect. Even the $500 million the bill allocated for projects related to the National Mall ahead of America 250, though, wasn’t enough to save East Potomac Park from being swallowed up by the river.

In 2011, the National Park Service commissioned a geotechnical study to investigate repairing the East Potomac seawall. It concluded that the project would require sinking new footings down as much as 10 feet into the river and possibly more than 100 feet into the bedrock below all along the park’s more than three-mile-long perimeter. It was going to cost “millions of dollars per foot—not miles, per foot,” says Kym Hall, the former National Capitol Area director at the National Park Service who was involved in the discussions. “It is an astronomical amount of money.”

Instead, the Park Service used the new funding to shore up the seawall around the Tidal Basin to protect the Jefferson Memorial and the famous cherry trees, as well as part of nearby West Potomac Park. But Hall says that even with the new appropriation, NPS could afford to fix only part of the Tidal Basin, which is less than a third of the size of East Potomac Park. After years of careful planning the Tidal Basin restoration still cost $113 million and took two years of construction.

To do what Trump wants to do at East Potomac, “They would also have to address the seawall,” says Stierli, who notes that conservation and park advocates have long been in favor of fixing it. “Unfortunately, what’s moving forward here is almost a replica of the type of thinking we’re seeing with the Reflecting Pool: An administration ignoring climate, ignoring science, ignoring the Park Service’s own plans.” He notes that the administration has fired most of the scientists who’ve worked on East Potomac. Trump is just “charging ahead, completely detached from the reality of this site and its landscape.”

It’s not just flooding that threatens Trump’s vision for East Potomac. “Hains Point is basically an artificial piece of land made up of dredgings and other waste soils, and with a very high water table,” says Peter Feldman, a hydrologist who did a stint at EPA working on the Superfund program. Putting a golf course there, he says, “would seem to be a poor idea generally.”

The DC government learned the hard way what sort of hazards lie below the surface of the artificial landmass. In 1936, East Potomac Park gained an outdoor swimming pool, with an attendant pool house that was renovated in the 1970s. Eventually, the National Park Service contracted with the DC government to take over its management. Former DC mayor Adrian Fenty even trained for triathlons in the only outdoor Olympic-size facility in the city. His administration famously installed a heater so that it could be used long after the rest of the city’s outdoor pools had closed for the season.

In 2014, the city decided that the time had come to upgrade the aging facility. Officials envisioned a state-of-the-art competitive aquatics facility that would include spectator seating and diving platforms, plus a renovated pool house. Preliminary engineering studies had warned that construction would be challenging. Just taking soil samples became an ordeal as boring holes quickly flooded.

“You can think of it like a sponge, or [like when] my wife gets out of the shower and leaves our bath mat completely soaked. It looks fine on the surface but once I start walking over it, the water all comes up,” Daniel Spielvogel, an engineer who co-authored a study on the site, would later explain at a contract dispute hearing. “It moves around. It squirts out on the floor. Those are the disturbance-sensitive soils that we want to avoid.”

Nonetheless, construction began in 2018, and almost immediately ran into trouble. Excavating the century-old site proved to be more like an archeological dig than a building project. Undocumented sewer, water, and electrical lines gummed up the works. An ancient pipe that flushed water from the pool into the Potomac River swamped the site along with groundwater that was not, as the contractor assumed, seven or 10 feet down, but just below the surface at roughly the same elevation as the river.

Workers installed sump pumps, only to see them swallowed up by the soupy soils that frequently caved in and threatened workers’ safety. When Spielvogel visited the site in September 2018, he found a “disgusting mess” of “muddy trenches and open excavations.” Things did not improve, and in 2020, the DC government cut its losses and, citing “significant flood risks,” abandoned the whole project. The site was filled in, and litigation ensued.

Ultimately, the city lost $14 million in taxpayer money, and residents lost an outdoor pool that had been in operation for almost 100 years. Today, all that’s left is a weedy lot, a monument to the risks of ignoring the realities of nature.

If Trump has a vague understanding that water and soil problems might be an issue for his championship golf course plans, his solution is not reassuring.

In October 2025, Trump shocked the country by demolishing part of the White House to build a ballroom. While discussing the project with the president, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested using the East Wing debris to elevate the new golf course. “Trump told Burgum he thought the idea was brilliant,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The administration began depositing some 30,000 cubic yards of White House rubble full of rebar, plaster, lead paint and asbestos between the fourth and ninth holes of the existing East Potomac golf course. Aside from the obvious environmental concerns, as a practical matter, covering East Potomac Park in White House wreckage is unlikely to solve its flooding issues. “I think they’re going to need a lot more soil than that,” says Mungeam. “That’s just a tiny amount of what would be needed to build a championship golf course.”  

Here’s why: East Potomac Park is built on “hydraulic fill,” which is both too soft and too weak to support much vertical construction, like for restaurants or clubhouses. If new fill is put down too quickly, or if it’s too heavy, it can cause the existing land to slide or settle, and the site can take years to stabilize.

High groundwater will likely exacerbate the problem, as will climate change. Like Washington, DC, itself, East Potomac faces extreme vulnerability to storm surges from hurricanes, particularly as the sea level rises. The US Army Corps of Engineers expects the Potomac River to rise more than three feet by 2080. Not even tearing down the rest of the White House would likely yield enough material to create a PGA-caliber playing surface on Hains Point.

The existing East Potomac golf course is basically flat, making it perfect for beginning and amateur players. But championship courses require such technical features as deep bunkers, water hazards, and dramatic slopes. Because of the park’s high water table, the only way Trump could create those sorts of enhancements is to bring in tons of new fill to pile on top of the existing land mass, which only will create more problems.

The result of all the earthmoving and extensive heavy truck traffic needed to bring in so much fill would compact the existing weak soil, and lay the foundation for future drainage issues, Mungeam says. And simply filling in the flood plain won’t end the course’s water wars. When golf course designers fill in a flood plain like the one at East Potomac, he says they’re required to create a new one to equalize the water.

If Trump’s hasty and ill-conceived construction fills in too much of East Potomac Park, the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere—perhaps to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall. The water, Mungeam explains, “has to go somewhere.”

Like so many of Trump’s monomaniacal plans to make over DC without any public input, much less expert guidance, his golf course takeover triggered a lawsuit. In February, local golfers and the DC Preservation League asked a judge to block the administration from pursuing any further action at East Potomac until it had complied with various environmental reviews and procedural requirements. In May, the plaintiffs went to court to request an emergency injunction after reports that the administration planned to close the course immediately and start renovations.

“I don’t want another demolished East Wing. I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”

US District Court Judge Ana Reyes declined to issue an injunction barring further work on the golf course. But she, too, was suspicious about Trump’s intentions. In early July, Reyes ordered the administration to come up with a plan to regularly update the court on its plans before “the bulldozers are starting. I don’t want another demolished East Wing,” she warned. “I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”

Even with court oversight, opponents of Trump’s golf course worry that if Trump is allowed to move forward with the golf course construction, the whole park will go the way of the old swimming pool.

“My fear,” says Save East Po’s Alex Rosen, is that  “they will dig a bunch of plumbing, they will move a ton of earth, and they will make a bunch of changes before realizing ‘oh, the water table here is actually pretty high.’” If that happens, he predicts, the administration will “throw their hands up and say ‘oops, our bad’” and leave behind a big, expensive mess that renders East Potomac unusable long after Trump leaves office.

At the same time, Rosen and other park lovers acknowledge that Trump is right about one thing: As with the crumbling seawall, the existing East Potomac golf course has long needed some TLC. But careful upgrades were already in the works before Trump got involved.

In 2019, the National Park Service signed a 50-year lease with the nonprofit National Links Trust that included a plan to rehab East Potomac. Legendary course designer Tom Doak was working pro bono, with community input, to preserve the essential character of the municipal course originally conceived by Walter Travis back in 1917. But in December, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the lease.

“This is a municipal site,” says the DC Preservation League’s Miller. “This is not Pebble Beach, and it doesn’t need to be.”