The general manager of President Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., has offered suggestions to guide the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and helped recruit one of the contractors for the job, according to federal documents and a government spokeswoman.
The manager, David Schutzenhofer, who has run the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster since 2006, is a private citizen with no known training in engineering or architecture.
An Interior Department spokeswoman said Mr. Schutzenhofer had advised the government on the repair project without becoming a temporary government employee. Had he become one, he would have been required to take ethics training and pledge to avoid conflicts of interest.
“Mr. Schutzenhofer is unpaid and is volunteering his time to offer suggestions on this project because he is an American patriot,” the spokeswoman, Katie Martin, said in an email. She called Mr. Schutzenhofer a world-renowned leader in the hospitality industry and said he did not “direct” any federal contracts.
The department did not provide details about Mr. Schutzenhofer’s involvement in the project. Neither Mr. Schutzenhofer nor the Trump Organization responded to requests for comment. In response to questions, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email, “Thanks to President Trump, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to its proper glory!”
Mr. Trump previously took credit for picking one of the contractors repairing the Reflecting Pool, saying the company had worked on the swimming pool at his golf club in Sterling, Va. But the president later reversed himself, saying he did not know the firm.
The Reflecting Pool is not a swimming pool, and repairing it is not an easy task. The iconic site has been plagued for decades by leaks and algae blooms, which various administrations have been unable to permanently fix.
The Trump administration set out to renovate it this spring, paying one contractor to waterproof its floor and another to install an improved water purification system. The project has already cost much more than Mr. Trump said it would, and Interior Department staff members have raised questions about the quality and speed of the waterproofing work.
The involvement of Mr. Schutzenhofer has not previously been reported.
Emails obtained by The New York Times show that he was playing a major role in late January, months before any contracts were awarded. Those emails indicate that Mr. Schutzenhofer spoke on Jan. 28 with Al George, the chief executive of an Ohio-based company called Greenwater Services, about the prospect that the government would hire the company to bring mobile, trailer-based filtration systems — seemingly a temporary stopgap — to treat the pool’s water.
Mr. Schutzenhofer told the company he would discuss its plan with the National Park Service, which is part of the Interior Department, the emails show. Then, in mid-February, Mr. Schutzenhofer forwarded an email from Greenwater to a Park Service official with a note saying, “Let’s jump on a call to review this.”
About two months later, in mid-April, Greenwater received a $1.7 million no-bid contract to install a permanent purification system at the pool. Mr. George, Greenwater’s chief executive, did not respond to questions about his interactions with Mr. Schutzenhofer. He previously declined to comment on that contract.
The Interior Department declined to say if Mr. Schutzenhofer had signed any kind of ethics pledges before beginning this work.
Federal contracting specialists “typically sign conflict-of-interest agreements that require them not to use the information for personal gain,” said Philip Lee, a government contracts lawyer at the law firm McCarter & English.
“If there’s nothing on paper, there’s no checks and balances,” said Mr. Lee, who previously worked as a contracting officer at the Interior Department.
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In April, the Trump administration also gave a no-bid contract worth $13.1 million to a Virginia-based firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings to waterproof and paint the Reflecting Pool. Mr. Trump had initially said that work would cost $1.8 million.
As part of that contract, Atlantic Industrial Coatings is spreading a waterproofing material called Rhino Pipeliner 5000 across the pool’s concrete slabs. An added tint is giving the pool a blue hue that Mr. Trump has called “American flag blue.”
That was a departure from the Park Service’s previous plans for fixing the pool. The agency had called for sealing leaky joints between the slabs, but not waterproofing the eight-inch-thick concrete slabs themselves.
Kevin Griess, the Park Service official overseeing the National Mall, said in a court filing this week that the idea had come from “the administration” and had not previously been considered by his team.
Government documents seen by The Times provide more detail: They identify the source of the plan as an adviser to the administration, whom they refer to as David S.
It was unclear if that was a reference to Mr. Schutzenhofer. Neither the Interior Department nor the White House responded to specific questions about that contract.
Interior Department employees have recently noticed bubbles and small holes in one of the layers meant to waterproof the pool. They have also questioned whether the repair work will be finished by Friday, the government’s contractual deadline.
Mr. Trump said on Saturday that the renovations were progressing as planned, though he appears to have changed the completion date.
“Looking really good! Should be completed before the Fourth of July, our target date,” he wrote in a post on social media, adding, “I’ve made this a much larger job than originally contemplated for purposes of Beauty, and a much longer life.”
One of the owners of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, Curtis E. Wood, previously declined to comment on the company’s work on the pool. He did not respond to questions about Mr. Schutzenhofer’s role.
Mr. Schutzenhofer is not the first veteran of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster to advise the administration. Edward Russo, the chairman of the White House Environmental Advisory Task Force, is a former consultant on environmental compliance for the golf club.
Last week, a nonprofit group called the Cultural Landscape Foundation filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the Reflecting Pool renovations. The suit argues that the administration is “harming its reflective quality and replacing the serene, character-defining gray basin with vivid blue paint reminiscent of a swimming pool.”
The administration fired back in a court filing on Monday evening, writing, “Their whole theory of the case wrongly assumes (based on a series of inaccurate news articles and satirical social media posts) that the Reflecting Pool will ultimately look like a swimming pool that you see at a resort or theme park. That’s not true.”
A hearing in the case is scheduled for Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington.
Ben Protess contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
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