Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Friday that the Justice Department would not reopen a criminal investigation into Jerome Pow Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, over cost overruns on renovations of the central bank’s headquarters, but that his office still intended to hold Mr. Powell accountable for mismanagement.
The remarks, made in an interview with Bloomberg, came days after the Fed’s inspector general released a report on the renovation of the Marriner S. Eccles building in Washington. The review, undertaken in July 2025 at Mr. Powell’s own request, found no criminal wrongdoing. It did find management and oversight failures on a project whose budget nearly doubled over four years.
“There’s a difference between whether he did anything wrong and whether he should be held accountable, and whether there’s any criminal conduct,” Mr. Blanche told Bloomberg. “I think the IG report speaks for itself about what the board did and did not do, and I think that we should focus on that sort of accountability, and I think that’s what the president expects me to do, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The criminal inquiry, though, is finished. “We closed that criminal investigation ... and we’re not reopening a criminal investigation into him,” Mr. Blanche said.
According to the inspector general’s findings, the Fed’s Board of Governors deviated from cost-management provisions in its “construction manager at risk” contract, a delivery method chosen specifically to avoid repeating budget overruns and delays that had plagued an earlier renovation of another Fed building. Investigators found the board repeated many of the same mistakes anyway, failing to put in place a number of available cost-control measures that could have limited the increases.
The review also concluded that the board’s internal project governance was fundamentally insufficient for a project of that size and complexity.
The numbers are stark. The project budget grew from $1.317 billion in February 2020 to $2.381 billion in December 2024. The construction portion more than doubled over the same period, from $921 million to $2.018 billion, and this past January the board received a proposed construction cost of $2.135 billion from its construction manager.
In January, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into testimony Mr. Powell gave last summer about the overruns. He answered with a video statement, arguing that the administration was pursuing him because it disagreed with the central bank’s handling of interest rates.