Trump Team Sabotaged Fed Renovation as Trump Started War With Powell

Trump is purposely using a construction project that his own appointees are making more expensive as grounds to pick a fight and potentially fire his nemesis, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The Fed building, opened in 1937, began undergoing plans for renovation in 2020 under the first Trump administration. While the architects wanted to give the Fed glass walls to indicate its transparency, three Trump appointees insisted on marble, which was much more expensive. One of those appointees was Duncan Stroik, who is now an architecture professor at Notre Dame. He acknowledged that the appointees on the commission willfully ignored the cost implications of sticking to marble.

“If they wanted to play the cost game, you do a marble facade and you do the glass facade and you compare the cost,” Stroik told the Associated Press. “And you know, they never did that.”

The project is now $600 million over budget, with an expected total cost of $2.5 billion, including additions of an underground parking garage and atria. The Trump administration is now blaming this on Powell, framing him as an irresponsible spender.

“Chairman Jerome Powell has grossly mismanaged the Fed,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote last week on X. “While continuing to run a deficit since FY23 (the first time in the Fed’s history), the Fed is way over budget on the renovation of its headquarters. Now up to $2.5 billion, roughly $700 million over its initial cost. These renovations include terrace rooftop gardens, water features, VIP elevators, and premium marble. The cost per square foot is $1,923--double the cost for renovating an ordinary historic federal building. The Palace of Versailles would have cost $3 billion in today’s dollars!”

But none of this was Powell’s idea.

Trump has sought to remove Powell as Fed chair for some time now, as he has consistently refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands to lower interest rates and remained brutally honest about the negative inflation impacts of Trump’s trade war. And while Trump has said that he won’t fire Powell outright, he certainly seems to be exhausting less direct methods.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now allowing ICE to use U.S. military bases to detain undocumented immigrants as part of Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts. 

In a brief letter signed Tuesday, Hegseth approved Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey “for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens.”

Hegseth insisted that the policy would “not negatively affect military training, operations, readiness, or other military requirements, including National Guard and Reserve readiness.” 

So, somehow having trangender people serve in the military affects readiness, but refashioning military facilities as internment camps doesn’t? In the case of both policies, the Trump administration is carrying out a wildly radical agenda that will only result in more human suffering. 

It was first reported in May that Camp Atterbury was being considered as a possible detention facility, as immigration arrests in Indiana surged. The base, which is operated by the National Guard, was one of a dozen military bases that housed hundreds of Afghan refugees in its barracks starting in 2021. 

In a statement Friday, Representative André Carson said he’d asked the federal government to confirm whether it intended to use the military training center in May, but received no reply. This week, the Indiana Democrat got his answer.  

“I remain concerned on this use of Camp Atterbury given the deplorable and inhumane conditions at other ICE detention facilities nationwide,” Carson said in a statement, stressing the “alarmingly high rates” of detainee deaths during the second Trump administration. At least 12 people have died in ICE custody so far this year. 

“This is a dark time for our nation. I will continue fighting these unlawful, cruel policies and will actively monitor activities at Camp Atterbury to ensure humane and sanitary conditions,” Carson added. 

A group of Democratic lawmakers from New Jersey also released a statement condemning the Trump administration’s decision. 

“This is an inappropriate use of our national defense system and militarizes a radical immigration policy that has resulted in the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants and unlawful deportation of U.S. citizens, including children, across the country,” said the statement from Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, and Representatives Herb Conaway Jr.,  Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, Frank Pallone, Nellie Pou, Donald Norcross, LaMonica McIver, and Josh Gottheimer.

Dick Durbin is leading the Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to receive more transparency regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, particularly an order from Attorney General Pam Bondi for FBI agents to “flag” any mention they made of President Trump.

In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin wrote: “According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” he added.

There was likely something for those agents to flag, given Trump’s well-documented relationship with the defamed sex trafficker. There’s the 2002 New York magazine quote where Trump referred to Epstein, his friend of “15 years,” as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” And there was the recent Wall Street Journal report that showed Trump writing a strange birthday message to Epstein in 2006, with the closing line “may every day be another wonderful secret.”

But what else was flagged under Bondi’s watch, and what happened to it? Durbin’s report asks just that:

Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?

1. Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.

2. What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?

Trump’s rollout of the Epstein files has been so disorderly that it has Democrats and the most hardcore MAGA loyalists asking the exact same question: What is the truth about Epstein?

The due date for Durbin and the committee’s request is August 1. Trump and Bondi have yet to comment.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says that Americans should expect future natural disasters to be handled similarly to the recent deadly flooding in Texas—and no, she wasn’t being ironic. 

During a press conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Thursday, Noem was in denial about just how badly she’d managed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to flooding in Texas earlier this month. 

“What you saw happen in Texas was much more how FEMA will look in the future. It won’t look like the response to [Hurricane] Katrina, or the response to even [Hurricane] Helene, and what happened in North Carolina, where people waited weeks and weeks and months and months for help,” she said.  

But Noem had severely botched FEMA’s Texas response by failing to renew contracts with companies staffing FEMA call centers, resulting in a majority of calls going unanswered for days as the flood waters raged. The secretary dismissed the reporting as “fake news.”

Noem also reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead for 72 hours. 

Last month, Donald Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season, and future disbursements would come straight from him. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be homeland security,” Trump said at the time. Clearly, putting Noem in charge of personally approving decisions in a disaster comes at a cost, and the Trump administration’s mismanagement of relief is more far-reaching than just the flooding in Texas. 

Twenty Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Wednesday, claiming that the White House had acted illegally when cancelling FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which funds infrastructure projects such as levees, shelters, and seismic testing to protect people against extreme weather. 

The most radical thing about Elon Musk this month is his staggering unpopularity.

Public opinion of the world’s richest man fell by 66 points since his foray into politics, according to a CNN poll released Thursday.

Musk was the most popular person according to a Bloomberg poll in June 2016—but nearly a decade later, his ratings have tanked. This month, just 23 percent of those polled viewed Musk favorably, with 60 percent having an unfavorable opinion of him, making net favorable opinion of the conservative tech tycoon -37 points, CNN reported. Much of that has happened over the past four months, during which his favorability ratings with the GOP have sunk by 55 points.

His sagging numbers have affected the viability of Musk’s third party dreams: Americans report that while they want a third party as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans, they decidedly do not want one started by Musk. Just 22 percent of voters actually favored a Musk-run third party, while 74 percent opposed it, according to CNN.

Other recent reports found similar results. A YouGov poll released Monday found that while nearly half of surveyed Americans—45 percent—felt that a successful third party was imperative for the country, just 11 percent of those polled said they would support Musk’s.

While Americans have long complained of red tape and waste at the upper echelons of the federal government, they did not enjoy the metaphorical “chainsaw” that Musk’s DOGE took to federal agencies and their services. Americans especially did not like Musk’s involvement, a New York Times review of several surveys reported in April.

Musk’s place in American politics has become particularly tenuous since he publicly severed ties with Donald Trump last month, trying (and failing) to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill” and accusing the president of being involved with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Despite Musk threatening to primary all Republicans who supported the budget bill, he was unable to sway a single vote.