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Attorney General Todd Blanche said his office intends to hold Jerome Powell accountable for mismanagement.
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.on the costly renovations of the central bank's headquarters in Washington, DC.
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.
""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" 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.
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.into testimony Powell gave last summer about cost overruns on renovations to the central bank's Marriner S. Eccles building.
Powell pushed back publicly, asserting that the Trump administration was pursuing the investigation because it disagreed with the central bank's handling of interest rates.that the Justice Department had issued to the Federal Reserve, effectively invalidating the criminal probe. And by April, the US Attorney's Office announced that it had"At no point during our evaluation did we find reasonable grounds to believe that a violation of federal criminal law had occurred requiring a referral to the U.S. Attorney General in accordance with the Inspector General Act," the IG's report read.on Wednesday,"This is Jerome Powell's fault, and he should be forced to resign, IMMEDIATELY!
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.
"Jennifer Schonberger is a veteran financial journalist covering markets, the economy, and investing. At Yahoo Finance, she covers the Federal Reserve, Congress, the White House, the Treasury, the SEC, the economy, cryptocurrencies, and the intersection of Washington policy with finance. Follow her on X
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