A senior Trump administration official said Friday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell is “considering resigning” as pressure grows for an investigation into whether he lied to Congress about the central bank’s “Palace of Versailles” renovations to its headquarters in Washington, DC.
Bill Pulte, the chair of US government-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, posted on X that he heard “reports” of Powell wavering about finishing his term — without providing any evidence.
“I think this will be the right decision for America, and the economy will boom,” the former journalist and private equity titan said.
Pulte, who as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency oversees Fannie and Freddie, did not reply to The Post’s request for comment.
A separate senior government official said “high-level, credible sources” inside the administration believe the under-fire Fed chair is weighing whether to walk away from his job.
The insider said Powell “had been feeling the heat” and has grown “fatigued “since The Post broke the story in April about how Fed bureaucrats had blown $2.5 billion on the revamp of its DC offices that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said was akin to the “Palace of Versailles.”
“Why would you stay at a party when no one wants you there?” the source added.
President Trump — who has repeatedly labeled Powell as “Too Slow” for failing to cut interest rates — on Thursday appointed three new members to the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates federal development projects.
The shake up at NCPC, which has five voting members, is being seen as yet another move to pile more pressure on the man he nominated as Fed chair in 2018 to step aside.
A senior administration official told The Post that the string of broadsides launched at the 72-year-old Powell were part of a game of “4D chess” being played by the commander-in-chief and his allies, designed to pressure him into resigning.
A Fed spokesman declined to comment, pointing only to remarks on April 4 where Powell said he “intends” to see out his full term that expires in May 2026.
Powell has been accused by Pulte and other critics of misleading Congress when he lashed out at this newspaper’s “inflammatory coverage” that he branded “misleading and inaccurate.”
“There’s no VIP dining room. There’s no new marble. There are no special elevators,” Powell insisted during a June 25 hearing to the Senate Banking Committee. “There are no new water features, there’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens.”
But his denials directly contradicted the project’s own planning document that had been signed off by NCPC in 2021.
The comments also drew scrutiny from the Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought on Thursday.
The White House spending watchdog took Powell to task for the glorified vanity project, which saw its costs balloon by 30% — from the original estimate of $1.9 billion.
“The President is extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System,” Vought wrote in a letter to Powell first obtained by The Post.
“Instead of attempting to right the Fed’s fiscal ship, you have plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul of your Washington DC headquarters,” he wrote.
On Tuesday, The Post obtained a copy of the Fed’s 2025 budget via the Freedom of Information Act that confirmed the eye-popping cost of the work for the first time.
Powell had claimed to Congress that many of the plans rubber-stamped by the NCPC had since been discarded.
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.
The Fed’s 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.
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.
But one White House insider insisted that Powell was going nowhere.
“There are no plans to change the Fed chair,” the senior source said.
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