President Donald Trump has thrown a fit after a watchdog found Jerome Powell not criminally liable in the Federal Reserve’s over-budget renovation.
Trump, 80, unleashed a 424-word Truth Social rant in which he recycled old insults for Powell and demanded that Todd Blanche, his one-time personal lawyer who is now attorney general, probe the matter further.
“He can’t manage a Building, and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to manage his High Interest Rate Policy (only on ‘TRUMP!‘),” the president said of the watchdog report, adding that he asked Blanche to “study” the findings, too.
The central bank’s inspector general released a long-awaited report Wednesday confirming that the Fed failed to rein in the project’s ballooning price tag, now estimated at $2.38 billion—more than $1 billion over a 2020 projection.
However, the watchdog found no evidence that anyone, including Powell, violated federal criminal law. That comes five months after the Justice Department dropped its criminal investigation into Powell, who was appointed Fed chair by Trump in his first term but later clashed with the president in MAGA 2.0.
Still, Trump seized on the report to revive his attacks on Powell. While Powell’s term ended in May, he still serves on the Fed board.
Trump called on Powell to resign “IMMEDIATELY,” raging over the renovation’s alleged cosmetic shortcomings.
“At a minimum, ‘Too Late’ Powell should be forced to resign from the Board,” he wrote.
Trump added, “If he doesn’t resign, he should be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government, for either corruption or incompetence, both of which are completely unacceptable.”
Trump, who put on a hard hat to inspect the renovations with Powell in July 2025, rambled on about the “boring” aesthetic choices in the overhaul of the 1930s-era Marriner S. Eccles Building and the adjacent Federal Reserve Board-East Building on the National Mall.
“Soundproofing, and all other elements of the Building, will be inferior to what was previously there. In particular, the magnificent beauty, sculptured ceilings and walls, and so many other things which made the Federal Reserve Building stand apart, will never be captured again, and are only being replaced by flat, boring, less than midlevel finishes,” he complained. “I could have done a far better Renovation for 25 Million Dollars, completely maintaining the MAGNIFICENCE of the structure, and had money left over.”
Trump called out the report’s finding that the Fed had yet to negotiate a guaranteed maximum price with its contractor, four years after construction began in 2022. He said this is “an absolutely unheard of situation!”
However, Trump is hardly a stranger to ballooning renovation costs himself, with many of his vanity projects in D.C. running millions over budget.
His White House ballroom is now estimated to cost at least $900 million, after he initially said it would cost $200 million. And when the Trump administration hired Atlantic Industrial Coatings to renovate the Reflecting Pool, it used a rarely used mechanism to let the contractor begin work before haggling over the price, The New York Times reported. The renovations turned out to be a botched job after the pool turned slimy and green.
At the end of his rant, Trump referenced his renaming spree, writing, “And no, I do not want this Building named after President Donald J. Trump, ME! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
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