The Trump administration is not looking to reopen a criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over cost overruns on renovations to the central bank’s headquarters.
But Attorney General Todd Blanche said his office intends to hold Powell accountable for mismanagement.
This week, the Fed’s inspector general released a report on the costly renovations of the central bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The investigation, undertaken in July 2025 at Powell’s request, found no criminal wrongdoing but cited several management and oversight failures. For that, Blanche said Friday, Powell should be held accountable.
“There’s a difference between whether he did anything wrong and whether he should be held accountable, and whether there’s any criminal conduct,” Blanche told Bloomberg in an interview. “I think the IG report speaks for itself about what the board did and did not do, and I think that we should focus on that sort of accountability, and I think that’s what the president expects me to do, and that’s what we’re doing.”
But he made clear that the criminal inquiry is dead.
“We closed that criminal investigation … and we’re not reopening a criminal investigation into him,” Blanche said.
According to the IG’s findings, the Fed’s Board of Governors deviated from key cost-management provisions in its “construction manager at risk” (CMAR) contract — a specific delivery method chosen precisely to avoid past mistakes. The CMAR framework was adopted following budget overruns and timeline delays during a prior renovation to another Fed building.
Read more: How much control does the president have over the Fed and interest rates?
However, investigators discovered that despite attempting to apply “lessons learned,” the Fed board repeated the same missteps, failing to implement numerous available cost-control measures that could have mitigated the significant spikes in construction costs.
The investigation also determined that the board’s internal project governance was fundamentally insufficient to oversee a project of such magnitude and structural complexity.
The budget for the project grew from $1.317 billion in February 2020 to $2.381 billion in December 2024. During that time, the construction portion of the budget more than doubled from $921 million to $2.018 billion. This past January, the board received a proposed construction cost of $2.135 billion from its construction manager.
In January, the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into testimony Powell gave last summer about cost overruns on renovations to the central bank’s Marriner S. Eccles building. Powell pushed back publicly with a video statement, asserting that the Trump administration was pursuing the investigation because it disagreed with the central bank’s handling of interest rates.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
