Jerome Powell has some $2.5 billion ‘splainin’ to do

OPINION:

Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, called out Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for excessive spending on building renovations — specifically, that a planned and budgeted multimillion-dollar project exceeded costs by $700 million, for a total of $2.5 billion.

It’s so easy to spend other people’s money.

Powell has the taxpayers to thank for the Eccles Building’s new rooftop terrace with gardens, exclusive and cushy VIP dining rooms and elevators, marble features and extra space. But he won’t.

“There’s no VIP dining room,” Powell said in late June to the Senate Banking Committee in response to a media report about the costly upgrades.

“There’s no new marble,” Powell said.

“There are no special elevators,” Powell said.

“There are no new water features, there’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens,” Powell said.

He sounds like Dr. Seuss.

Vought’s recent OMB letter to Powell, however, tells a different story.

The project includes “rooftop terrace gardens, VIP private dining rooms and elevators, water features, premium marble and much more,” the letter states.

It also includes more than three times the OMB’s recommended amount of office space for employees.

“The president is extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System,” Vought said in a statement, The Blaze reported. “Instead of attempting to right the Fed’s fiscal ship, you have plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul of your Washington, D.C., headquarters. 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!”

It’s common for building renovations to deviate from original estimates.

But $700 million is a substantial deviation.

And in a time of the Department of Government Efficiency, when Americans expected cuts to the bureaucracy and a halt to wasteful spending, creating rooftop garden terraces on the taxpayers’ coin is completely out of line. Powell should be pushed to provide answers to the American public.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.