Trump awarded a $6.9 million no-bid government contract to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue to a contractor he said had worked on his personal pools, using an 'urgent' exemption to bypass normal competitive bidding rules. The pool repaint is expected to require repairs much sooner than typical, and actual costs already exceeded Trump's initial estimate. This represents the kind of direct self-dealing between presidential preference and government spending that ethics rules are designed to prevent—though Trump's position allows him to invoke emergency exceptions that circumvent standard oversight.