President Donald Trump visited the Federal Reserve on Thursday, escalating a pressure campaign against central bank chief Jerome Powell over his management of ongoing renovations at the Fed’s century-old headquarters.
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Donning white construction hard hats, Trump stood next to Powell and delivered brief afternoon remarks in what quickly turned into an awkward televised spectacle. The president abruptly pulled out a sheet of paper and claimed the cost of the project had ballooned to $3.1 billion from $2.5 billion. “It went up by a little bit, or a lot,” Trump said.
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That appeared to catch Powell off-guard. He shook his head and disputed Trump’s figures on live TV. “I’m not aware of that,” he said. “I haven’t heard that from anyone at the Fed.”
The Fed chief said Trump had mistakenly included the price tag of another Fed building that had been upgraded in 2021. “You just added in a third building. … It was built five years ago,” Powell said. “It’s not new.”
The president later reiterated his ongoing demand for lower interest rates. At the tour’s conclusion, he dialed down his criticism somewhat. “I don’t want to put that in this category,” Trump said when asked if the cost overruns were a fireable offense. “This is a very expensive job. It got out of control, and that happens.”
Trump is only the third president to visit the Fed in an official capacity, an extremely rare occurrence that illustrates the institution’s usual insulation from politics. President George W. Bush was the last one who made the trek in 2006 for Ben Bernanke’s swearing-in as central bank chief.
Administration officials and their allies have latched onto the ongoing Fed upgrades to its Washington headquarters to allege Powell has bungled the project and to build a case to fire him for cause. The president has mused about firing Powell, only to later downplay the possibility amid warnings of the chaos it could unleash in financial markets. He has been furious about the central bank sitting still on interest rates, arguing it causes the U.S. to overpay interest on its national debt.
Trump joined a visit arranged by White House adviser James Blair, White House budget chief Russell Vought, and Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte. The trio form the nucleus of Trump’s scorched-earth campaign against the Fed for its decision not to lower interest rates so far this year. Trump’s tour of the renovation site lasted just over an hour, per the White House schedule. Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina also toured the site.
“What we don’t want to do is the Fed to be playing politics,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a close Trump ally who believes Powell should step aside, said earlier in the day. “And it appears like it is being political right now.”
Trump administration officials had said the president won’t take the drastic step of firing Powell, and will allow him to serve out the last nine months of his term, which ends next May. Legal experts say that Trump ousting Powell would likely set off a lengthy court battle with no guarantee of success for the president.
“He’s not going to fire him,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told MSNBC on Wednesday.
Still, Bessent has aligned himself with the rest of the Trump administration by urging an expansive probe into the Fed’s non-monetary policy operations. He called the Fed “an unaccountable agency” in a Thursday Fox Business interview.
There has long been a bipartisan deference to the Fed in its dual mandate of ensuring stable prices and maximum employment. But there might be a shift underway among Republicans who are lending backup to Trump and demanding more information from the Fed.
On Thursday, GOP Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, who chairs a House subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, sent a letter to Powell seeking more information about the project.
“The Committee is committed to getting answers to better understanding the Federal Reserve’s building renovations,” Brooke Nethercott, a spokesperson for Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement.
That followed a Wednesday letter from Scott to Powell pushing for more documentation to support Powell’s testimony about the renovation.
Still, other corners of the GOP aren’t joining the Trump-led firefight against the Fed.
“‘I’ve said it from day one, it works better for the administration if they can show these folks as being independent and supporting them,” said Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, another member of the banking panel.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum, called the Trump visit “a sideshow.”
Powell has defended his handling of the renovation project, and sent a letter to the White House last week saying his testimony to Congress about the upgrades were accurate. The Fed published a video of the construction site this week in a Q&A page that showed the installation of blast-resistant windows among other refurbishments.
