President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the Federal Reserve in person Thursday — an unusual move that’s also a major escalation in the White House’s pressure campaign against Chair Jerome Powell.
The visit will ostensibly allow Trump to inspect the $2.5 billion renovation under way at the Fed’s headquarters. Powell’s management of the project, beset by cost overruns, has been raised by White House officials as a possible pretext for removing him after a Supreme Court ruling indicated the president’s powers over executive branch officials do not necessarily apply to the Federal Reserve.
It is not clear when the visit was added to Trump’s schedule, which was released late Wednesday night. The White House spent the first part of this week downplaying speculation that the president would fire Powell, even as Trump continued to harangue him on social media for leaving interest rates unchanged. Trump appointed Powell in his first term.
“There’s nothing that tells me that [Powell] should step down right now. He’s been a good public servant,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business on Tuesday. Later that day, Trump said he believes that Powell has “done a bad job” but noted that Powell, whose term as Fed chair ends in May, will “be out pretty soon anyway.” On Wednesday, Bessent said on MSNBC that Trump isn’t going to fire Powell.
Trump favors lowering interest rates to boost activity in the economy. But Powell has said that forecasts of faster price growth, largely a result of Trump’s tariffs, suggest interest rates should remain at their current levels to keep inflation in check. Earlier this month, Powell said the Fed would have cut rates by now if not for the expected impact of Trump’s import taxes.
“In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs,” Powell said at a European Central Bank forum in Portugal.
The Fed will announce its next rate decision at the end of its next policy meeting on July 30, and is expected to leave them unchanged again.
Presidential visits to the Fed’s main building, a short drive from the White House, are rare. The last president to do so was George W. Bush, who attended the 2006 swearing-in ceremony of his former economic adviser, Ben Bernanke, as chair. Only two other presidents have made the trip: Gerald Ford in 1975 and Franklin D. Roosevelt to inaugurate the building in 1937.
The Fed declined to comment when asked about the visit.
Administration officials have decried the cost of the renovation project, saying the Fed is spending billions on a “lavish” and “ostentatious” palace containing VIP dining rooms, terraces, fancy elevators and high-end marble.
However, Powell and the central bank have repeatedly said the features of the renovation that the White House and Republicans have seized on are misleading.
On June 25, Powell told the Senate banking committee: “There’s no [VIP] dining room. There’s no new marble. We took down the old marble, we’re putting it back up. We’ll have to use new marble where some of the old marble broke. But there’s no special elevators. There’s just old elevators that have been there.”
The Fed launched an FAQ page on its website that says that rising costs associated with the project are due primarily because of the cost of raw materials, consultations with review agencies and the building containing more asbestos than anticipated.
Those review agencies, of which Trump appointees were members, also pushed for more marble in the renovation plans rather than glass.
