President Donald Trump announced a sweeping overhaul of Washington, D.C.'s century-old East Potomac Golf Links with a blueprint by renowned golf course architect Tom Fazio, who has designed several of the president’s golf courses.

In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Donald Trump said the decision comes after he had toured the property with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Tom Fazio. Fazio has earlier designed the Trump National Doral and the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles.

Work starts September 1, the President wrote, and the ambitious plan will transform the current 36-hole public facility into a championship-style course to rival destination layouts like Berthpage black.

"When completed, this Course will have the ability to host Major Golf Tournaments, including The U.S. Open, The Ryder Cup, The PGA Championship, and other top PGA Tour events,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"The grass is largely dead, the greens are virtually unplayable, and the Course is in very poor general condition but, after many years of horrendous maintenance, and little money devoted to the process of upkeep, we have determined that this location can bring tremendous success and prestige back to Washington, D.C."

He added the administration plans to transform it into 'one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World' while keeping it open to the public.

East Potomac, built on reclaimed land along the Potomac River and opened in the early 1920s, has been part of Washington for more than a century.

The National Links Trust (NLT), a nonprofit that signed a 50-year lease with the National Park Service back in 2020, has run the course for the past several years.

The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration and NLT announced an agreement on May 8 that allows the organization to continue managing East Potomac on an interim basis.

According to the agreement, National Links Trust will receive a new long-term lease to operate Langston Golf Course and Rock Creek Park Golf, while continuing to oversee East Potomac until the federal government begins renovations.

However, who runs East Potomac once that restoration is finished is still unclear.

But Turning East Potomac's Vision Into Reality Won't Be Easy

East Potomac has always been a public course first.

The Wall Street Journal reported, "The National Links Trust, which manages the course, has moved to make golf more affordable and charges green fees as low as $9."

The report further added: "The Trump Organization has more than a dozen luxury golf courses around the world. A golfer teeing off at the organization’s course in Scotland would have to pay about $740."

The flooding is another big problem. East Potomac sits low and close to the river, which means it floods easily.

Fazio told Golf.com that his team is studying how to keep the low-lying property from flooding. He also said the debris from the White House East Wing demolition would not be enough to solve the problem on its own.

East Potomac also has a space problem that's much harder to engineer around.

"If they are talking about a major, you need big areas — there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to come in," Jonathan Temme, a regional manager of iEDM, an Australian engineering firm, told the Athletics.

“In an area like this, which is fairly water-locked, it just limits a lot of that ability.”

If Trump's plans move forward as described, it will fall to Fazio and the Department of the Interior to solve the flooding and the space crunch problems to make the course a world-class facility.

Read more at Club Golf!

Written by

Md Saife Fida

Edited by

Koushik Biswas