five voting members<\/a>, is being seen as yet another move to pile more pressure on the man he nominated as Fed chair in 2018 to step aside.<\/p>\nA senior administration official told The Post that the string of broadsides launched at the 72-year-old Powell were part of a game of \u201c4D chess\u201d being played by the commander-in-chief and his allies, designed to pressure him into resigning.<\/p>\n
A Fed spokesman declined to comment, pointing only to remarks on April 4 where Powell said he \u201cintends\u201d to see out his full term that expires in May 2026.<\/p>\n
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has repeatedly called for Powell to quit after what he called his \u201cdeceptive\u201d testimony to Congress last month. Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Powell has been accused by Pulte and other critics of misleading Congress when he lashed out at this newspaper\u2019s \u201cinflammatory coverage\u201d that he branded \u201cmisleading and inaccurate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no VIP dining room. There\u2019s no new marble. There are no special elevators,\u201d Powell insisted during a June 25 hearing to the Senate Banking Committee. \u201cThere are no new water features, there\u2019s no beehives, and there\u2019s no roof terrace gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n
But his denials directly contradicted the project\u2019s own planning document that had been signed off by NCPC in 2021.<\/p>\n
The comments also drew scrutiny from the Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought on Thursday.<\/p>\n
REUTERS<\/p>\n
The White House spending watchdog took Powell to task for the glorified vanity project, which saw its costs balloon by 30% \u2014 from the original estimate of $1.9 billion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe President is extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System,\u201d Vought wrote in a letter to Powell first obtained by The Post.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of attempting to right the Fed\u2019s fiscal ship, you have plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul of your Washington DC headquarters,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, The Post obtained a copy of the Fed\u2019s 2025 budget via the Freedom of Information Act that confirmed the eye-popping cost of the work for the first time.<\/p>\n
Powell had claimed to Congress that many of the plans rubber-stamped by the NCPC had since been discarded.<\/p>\n
Rendings filed with the NCPC show what the controversial $2.5 billion project will look like once completed. NCPC<\/p>\n
Vought said that would be a flagrant breach of the National Capital Planning Act that regulates building work on the National Mall. His letter demanded that Powell provide answers to a list of questions by next week.<\/p>\n
The Fed\u2019s next meeting is scheduled for the end of the July. The consensus on Wall Street is that the Fed interest rate, currently between 4.25% and 4.5%, will again remain unchanged.<\/p>\n
Should Powell step down, his reported replacements are most likely to be Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council of the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh.<\/p>\n
But one White House insider insisted that Powell was going nowhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are no plans to change the Fed chair,\u201d the senior source said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A senior Trump administration official said Friday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell is \u201cconsidering resigning\u201d as pressure grows…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,12,4664,2800,4665,2938,4666,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-4074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-fannie-mae","11":"tag-federal-reserve","12":"tag-freddie-mac","13":"tag-jerome-powell","14":"tag-scott-bessent","15":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}