A private company run by a supporter of President Donald Trump has pledged $1 million to restore the grass on the South Lawn of the White House after it was destroyed by the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held there earlier this month.
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The White House announced last week that ScottsMiracle-Gro, an Ohio-based company, will commit $1 million to restore the South Lawn after the UFC event held on Trump’s 80th birthday left it heavily damaged. The company said it is donating “a combination of monetary and product support,” including re-sodding the South Lawn and then creating a “custom turfgrass blend” with which to reseed it.
It is unclear whether the commitment includes restoring the grass on the White House Ellipse, which was similarly damaged after the event. Aerial photos taken over the weekend by Reuters showed a large, circular expanse of dirt where the verdant Ellipse had been.
The National Park Service, which typically handles White House lawn maintenance, directed inquiries Monday to the White House. Representatives for the White House said that ScottsMiracle-Gro had offered a private donation to the National Park Service to go toward lawn care, and that no taxpayer dollars would be used. A spokesperson from ScottsMiracle Gro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a nonprofit government watchdog, said the arrangement raises ethics questions, particularly following the recent failed repairs at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which was done under a no-bid contract awarded to a Trump ally.
“Major corporations generally don’t do things out of the goodness of their heart. It’s generally — they do things for the government because they want something from the government,” CREW vice president Jordan Libowitz told The Washington Post.
Libowitz noted that ScottsMiracle-Gro markets and distributes the herbicide Roundup, whose active ingredient, glyphosate, has been the subject of lawsuits alleging that it causes cancer. In February, Trump signed an executive order calling glyphosate “crucial to the national security and defense” of the country, a move that angered part of his base. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to block lawsuits that allege Roundup causes cancer.
ScottsMiracle-Gro CEO James Hagedorn is a longtime Trump supporter who has advised the president on a different kind of grass: He lobbied for marijuana to be reclassified from a Schedule I drug — the most strictly regulated — to a Schedule III drug, and praised Trump when he signed an executive order late last year doing so.
Libowitz said it is not unusual for American presidents to boost American businesses, though usually they are not singled out in the way Trump has before — by including Palantir’s stock ticker, for example, in a social media post that touted the defense company.
Last week, the official White House social media accounts announced ScottsMiracle-Gro’s donation in a post that seemed “just a little off” and like an ad, Libowitz added, particularly since the company was one of the sponsors of the UFC event.
“It’s not just like ‘I support American businesses.’ It’s ‘I want you to put money behind the businesses supporting me,’ ” Libowitz said of Trump’s posts promoting private companies.
“It seems to be this whole [UFC] event was an opportunity for different corporations to advertise in front of the president,” he added.
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Organizers of the UFC event had anticipated the grass would be destroyed when planning the event. Last year, UFC CEO Dana White told the Sports Business Journal that they were allocating $700,000 to replace the grass “because we’re going to f— up the South Lawn.”
White and the UFC did not immediately return requests for comment Monday about whether the UFC would still be paying for any portion of the repairs to the South Lawn or to the Ellipse.
As America approaches its 250th birthday, the grass-less Ellipse and South Lawn — paired with the algae-filled Reflecting Pool and demolished East Wing of the White House — have drawn partisan criticism.
“In the 250th year anniversary of USA the @WhiteHouse and surroundings looks so terrible…is so sad to see…” José Andrés, a chef and vocal Trump critic, wrote on X.
According to ScottsMiracle-Gro, Trump personally selected a blend of tall fescues and Kentucky bluegrasses to restore the South Lawn.
“The president knows a lot about grass. I think his history and past with golf courses,“ Nate Baxter, ScottsMiracle-Gro chief operating officer, told Fox Business.
Grass experts said it would be more cost effective to reseed the lawn, rather than to lay down new sod and then reseed, but it would have taken several weeks for grass seed to germinate and establish itself. The White House did not address questions about why they opted to resod and whether the new sod would be laid in time for July 4.
“To replace it with sod, you’re talking a pretty significant financial expenditure or impact,” said Steve Mercogliana, director of operations at the Philadelphia-based Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Mercogliana, whose business went viral after it inexplicably hosted a 2020 news conference for Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team, said organizers could have also spared large swaths of grass by building a small platform to keep people off the lawn. He said he watched a little bit of the UFC fight “here and there,” but couldn’t help doing so through a landscapers’ lens.
“I was curious. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh man, I wonder what that ground’s going to look like when all these people leave the premise? What’s the impact of that?’ And here we are,” he said.
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