A December 2024 Elon Musk tweet 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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Levin said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that his interest in the renovations is centered around a desire to see better oversight of the central bank.

“When I came to Dartmouth, one of my resolutions was to try to understand what makes an effective central bank,” Levin said.

Levin, who worked at the Fed for two decades, in part thrust the issue into the spotlight this year when he published two policy briefs through the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank. The first was a deep dive into the Fed’s operating expenses and its workforce.

The second went into even further detail about the renovation and the cost overruns associated with it, overruns that improbably became the top focus of the political news cycle, at least for the day that Trump visited the Fed to see the project in person.

But Levin said that this all essentially kicked off when Musk — then tasked with leading the Department of Government Efficiency — fired off that tweet about the Fed being overstaffed in December.

Levin said that the Musk tweet came with no further details and that the Tesla founder didn’t cite any data to back up the claim. Levin didn’t hear about the tweet at the time, but in January a reporter asked Powell about the idea.

Powell responded that the Fed runs “a very careful budget process … we’re fully aware that we owe that to the public, and we believe we do that.”

Just after that, Powell was asked a similar question during a congressional hearing.

“No, I would say … overworked maybe, not overstaffed. Everybody at the Fed works really hard,” Powell told lawmakers.

That’s about when Levin, who spent years at the Fed, said he began to really take notice. He said Powell, like Musk, didn’t cite any data to back up his claim. Levin said that, given his tenure at the Fed, he had a pretty good idea of where to track down data on personnel, staffing, salaries, and other costs — information buried in appendices and footnotes and the like.

“I wasn’t necessarily expecting to find anything that would be of interest to anyone else but myself, I was just honestly curious,” Levin said.

That project culminated in the first policy brief, titled: Is the Federal Reserve Overstaffed or Overworked? Insights from the Fed’s Financial Statements. That was published in March.

“The conclusion of that brief really was that Congress should be looking into this and the Fed can be independent in setting monetary policy, but it can’t be totally independent,” Levin said. “And so Congress should be looking at the Fed’s payroll and salaries.”

Levin asserted that part of the reason there isn’t more scrutiny is because the Fed doesn’t have a truly independent inspector general or face Government Accountability Office reviews like normal government agencies. The Fed inspector general, who currently works under direct control of the Fed chair, should rather report directly to Congress, Levin contends.

The Dartmouth economist said that, while going through the budget documents, he realized that the Fed’s capital budget had dramatically increased. So Levin dedicated a couple of pages in his 21-page March policy brief to the matter.

“But it was in the context of a brief that was really mostly focused on the personnel and salaries and staff,” he said.

Then, the building upgrades began to garner media attention when the New York Post contacted Levin about it and published a story in which Levin said that the Fed was building the “Palace of Versailles on the National Mall.”

The buildings at the center of the renovation — the Eccles building and 1951 Constitution Avenue — had an estimated budget of $1.9 billion in back in 2023, but by 2025 those costs had ballooned to $2.5 billion. Both are located near the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Levin said that his policy brief and the subsequent coverage of the Fed ruffled feathers at the Fed. In fact, he said a member of the Fed admonished him while he was at a conference at Stanford University in May.

Levin said that he was in the parking lot of a hotel where conference participants were waiting for a shuttle bus when Chris Waller, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, walked up to him and loudly called him a “troublemaker.” Levin said the rebuke was very public and there were several other people around.

“I was disappointed that he called me a troublemaker, because it seems like the correct response for an effective, healthy organization is to welcome external input,” Levin said.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Fed for comment on the interaction.

Levin, who has a PhD in economics from Stanford University, is well known in Fed circles and influential in the monetary economics space. Citations of his research frequently rank him among the top monetary economists in the world, according to Dartmouth, where he has worked for the past decade.

After all of that, Levin then began preparing a second policy brief for Mercatus, which was published in June and titled: The Federal Reserve Should Welcome the Appointment of an Independent Inspector General.

High up in the second brief, Levin included an infographic comparing the costs associated with the Fed headquarters compared to the inflation-adjusted costs of other massive architectural projects, such as the U.S. Capitol Building, the Petronas Twin Towers, and the Palace of Versailles.

Just days later, Powell was set to testify before the Senate Banking Committee as part of his semiannual update to Congress about monetary policy. Ahead of the meeting, Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) and some colleagues sent a letter to Powell previewing topics that they hope he would address in the hearing. At the top of the list, citing media reports, were the building renovations.

During the hearing, Powell acknowledged the price overruns, but said media reports of the renovations have been “misleading and inaccurate in many, many respects.” He also said that the headquarters building is “not really safe.” Powell also pushed back on some of the splashiest accusations.

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

But the matter didn’t go away. The Trump administration, which had already directed its ire toward Powell and the Fed over interest rates, then began to take interest in the renovations.

In July, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought sent a letter to Powell probing him with questions over the renovation of the headquarters. The letter said that President Donald Trump is “extremely troubled” by his management of the Fed and called the overhaul of the headquarters “ostentatious.”

Powell responded in writing that he would ask the Fed’s independent inspector general to conduct a “fresh review” of the project.

But then it was announced that Trump and a group of administration officials would tour the facility and ongoing work.

The tour got outsize media attention for the awkwardness of the moment and just how unusual it is for the president to tour a Fed building. And Trump and Powell sparred in front of the press over the central bank’s construction spending, generating more headlines and more attention to the project.

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Levin, who appears to have kicked up much of the hubbub surrounding the renovation, told the Washington Examiner that he sees the current moment as a chance to push for the appointment of a fully independent IG who would report directly to Congress.

“There’s a moment of opportunity here, hopefully in the next few months, that Congress could take some significant steps to strengthen the Fed’s accountability,” Levin said. And if they miss that opportunity, the next time it could be something worse.”