Name: How Trump Is Using Building Renovations as a Way to Oust Fed Chair Powell
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T02:33:00Z
Duration: 3 min 58 s
Description: President Trump denies he’s considering firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but his administration has ramped up its criticism of the central bank’s $2.5 billion office renovation. WSJ’s Nick Timiraos explains why.

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President Trump denies he’s considering firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but his administration has ramped up its criticism of the central bank’s $2.5 billion office renovation. WSJ’s Nick Timiraos explains why. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250717/78d7a588-50d6-45d8-9c08-ee27e5c65371/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

President Trump denies he’s considering firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but his administration has ramped up its criticism of the central bank’s $2.5 billion office renovation. WSJ’s Nick Timiraos explains why.

How Trump Is Using Building Renovations as a Way to Oust Fed Chair Powell

Narrator: President Trump says he's not planning to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

I don't rule out anything, but I think it's highly unlikely.

Narrator: But in recent days, the Trump Administration has been ramping up its pressure on the Fed chair over a 2 1/2 billion dollar renovation of the Central Bank's office buildings overlooking the National Mall in Washington.

People are taking seriously. This is a credible threat to possibly try to remove the Fed chair.

He should have cut interest rates a long time ago.

Donald Trump had a closed door meeting earlier this week with Republicans, and he asked them, "Should I try to fire the Fed chair, Jay Powell?" And after people said yes, he said he was thinking about doing it.

Narrator: This isn't the first time Trump has considered ousting the Fed chair.

If I want him out, he'll be out of there real fast, believe me.

Narrator: In May, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could fire agency officials, while also signaling the Fed chair was off limits.

Courts have said you can't do it over policy dispute, but you can do it for cause, which courts have generally interpreted as malfeasance or dereliction of duty. So this could be a pretext to try to fire Powell and say, well, this isn't over interest rates. This is over mismanaging your building costs. Courts may not uphold it, but this seems as if it could certainly be a pretext to try to seek a for cause removal of the Fed chair, which really has never been attempted before.

I think he's terrible. I think he's a total stiff. But the one thing I didn't see him is a guy that needed a palace to live in.

The Fed's building renovations are not new. If you go to Washington DC right now, you can see these construction cranes on the skyline. This is a years-old project. It's very expensive.

Narrator: On its website, the Fed says various factors have driven up the price of the project, including higher costs of materials and unforeseen conditions like asbestos and toxic contamination in soil. Some of the building's features, like rooftop spaces and new water features, were scaled back or eliminated as the project moved forward.

There's a commission in Washington DC. If you wanna build anything that's really in the core Downtown area, you have to go through the National Capital Planning Commission. And that's what the Fed did several years ago before this project started. They got approval. Trump last week put three of his senior White House advisors onto the planning commission. And to some people, it looks like a fishing expedition to try to go find other embarrassing revelations that you might be able to use to build a case to fire Powell or to just make life very uncomfortable for him. This issue was sort of lying in plain sight and it came up at a congressional hearing last month.

Can I just quickly say some of those are just flatly misleading. The idea of elevators, you know, it's the same elevator. It's been there since the building was built. So that's a mischaracterization. And some of those are no longer in the plans, you know, that's earlier. The plans have continued to evolve.

Let's say Trump posts online that he is firing Jay Powell. What happens next? No one really knows. It would be very messy. The Fed owns their own buildings. They have their own police force. They are self-funded. So that would provide some degree of protection to Powell, that he could continue to go to work until either a court rules, if he challenges this in court, until the Senate confirms his successor, or until his colleagues on the Board of Governors no longer recognize him as the chair. But it would be an institutional debacle, the likes of which we've never seen before.

Narrator: The building pressures have come as Trump pushes the Fed to lower interest rates to reduce government borrowing costs.

I think he does a terrible job. He's costing us a lot of money.

In the last few days, you've seen bank CEOs at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup all come out and say this is important. If you mess with the Fed's independence to get lower short-term interest rates, which is what happens when the Fed cuts interest rates, you could drive up longer-term interest rates. That could be bad for the economy, it could be bad for the banking system, it would be bad for financial markets. And so you're starting to see some of these stakeholders say, "Hold on here, don't go down this path."

How Trump Is Using Building Renovations as a Way to Oust Fed Chair Powell

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