How a former staffer got the Fed’s renovation cost overruns on Trump’s radar

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A December 2024 Elon Musk X post about overstaffing at the Federal Reserve led an academic economist to bring about a series of events that culminated in President Donald Trump standing next to a beleaguered Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on a tour of the central bank.

The academic, Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and former Fed official, raised awareness that the central bank’s building renovations were ballooning in cost to $2.5 billion, prompting increased scrutiny of the multiyear project and giving Trump allies a line of attack against Powell.

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