Is Trump Using an Obscure Architecture Board to Fire Jerome Powell?

Yahoo

11-07-2025

On Wednesday night, President Donald Trump ousted Joe Biden's appointees to the National Capital Planning Commission, the obscure panel that oversees urban planning for the Washington area. And instead of the usual wonky architecture types, the replacements are sharply political White House heavyweights: Staff Secretary Will Scharf, Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and Stuart Levenbach, an aide to Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought.
On the face of it, it seemed like a strange use of senior officials' time. At their inaugural meeting Thursday, the three sat through an afternoon of discussions about lighting plans for a Smithsonian building and guidelines for protecting pollinating insects.
But their presence made a lot more sense when the new commissioners spoke up — and promptly took aim at one of Trump's political foes, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Powell has resisted Trump's demands to lower interest rates. In response, Republicans have launched a campaign on social media and in Congress against the Fed chair, himself a first-term Trump nominee.
It's not the sort of campaign that usually winds up in front of the National Capital Planning Commission. But Blair took the mic for his maiden speech to the group to do just that. 'We should not be made fools of,' he thundered, referencing a renovation project to the Fed's headquarters that he called far more opulent than the one the Planning Commission approved. Blair cited a professor who implied Powell had lied under oath to the Senate about the renovation, which has become a refrain for GOP officials and conservative media.
As my colleagues Victoria Guida and Declan Harty reported this month, some Republicans see the controversy as a reason for Trump to fire Powell for cause — thereby avoiding a legal crisis over his desire to remove the head of an independent federal body.
'I am going to request a full review of plans of the Federal Reserve project,' Blair said, referring to the project as the 'Taj Mahal on the National Mall.' 'I'm going to ask that they send us a detailed explanation package of any and all upgrades, changes and modifications to the plan that was submitted here in 2021 and approved,' he added. 'I'm going to request a site visit.'
His fellow Trump appointees concurred. 'Please count me in,' said Luvenbach. 'I look forward to working with you on this letter and in scrutinizing this building.' The other commissioners — who include appointees of D.C.'s local government, congressional committees and cabinet agencies — stayed quiet.
It was, to say the least, an unusual moment for a largely apolitical commission that has rarely made news during its 101-year history. The audience for Blair's remarks was largely made up of architects with business before the panel. I was the lone person sitting in the area reserved for the media.
But in Washington, this little-noticed moment served as a reminder of something Trump himself said at a Tuesday cabinet meeting: He has a lot of power over the shape of the city, and he intends to use it. The Planning Commission has the power to approve or reject not just federal buildings, but also D.C. government projects and privately-owned properties in certain core parts of the capital.
At the meeting Thursday, for instance, commissioners weighed in on a D.C. government-led redevelopment project along the Anacostia River, a Jeff Bezos-sponsored learning center at the Air and Space Museum and proposed renovations to the arena that houses Washington's hockey and basketball teams. In theory, that's a lot of leverage over a lot of people.
In the case of Powell, the leverage comes in the form of the Planning Commission's approval of the initial plan for the headquarters, which calls for 'additions that should emphasize the Federal Reserve's civic importance while being modest and restrained.' During the session, the Trump appointees to the panel said the now-$2.5 billion price tag didn't comport with the promise of modesty. Blair told me afterward that his concerns were unrelated to the tussle over interest rates.
'I think with a commission like this, it's extremely important, obviously, to get the planning right on the front end, but it's also equally important to ensure that when plans are duly approved, the construction proceeds according to plan,' Scharf said in his opening remarks. Of course, litigating a term like 'modest' is a tough thing to do. But if the goal is to make life unpleasant for a guy you want to pressure, that's not really the point.
And the bigger campaign is hard to miss. In a letter to Powell that was posted on social media while the Planning Commission was still meeting, Vought — the boss of new commissioner Levenbach — accused the Fed of violating the National Capital Planning Act, which undergirds the commission. (That same law, incidentally, calls for commissioners to be 'citizens with experience in city or regional planning,' which is a bit of a stretch for the new Trump appointees.)
The Federal Reserve declined to comment Friday morning. Testifying before the Senate this summer, Powell dismissed allegations that the building was too opulent.
There are plenty of other places where political influence over obscure planning bodies can give the White House new muscle. Locally, it has already become part of a city debate over a proposed new stadium for the Washington Commanders. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser's proposal to build on the site of the old RFK stadium is strongly supported by Trump. But some members of the city council are balking at the proposed taxpayer subsidies involved in bringing the NFL back to the city. Lobbying for votes, the mayor's allies have talked up the potential of Trump using bodies like the Planning Commission to re-open the project if the council doesn't OK it as-is.
But what's notable about Trump, our first developer president, is that some of the places where he wants to use the Planning Commission actually line up with its mission.
The look and shape of buildings, which never used to vary much between Democratic and Republican presidencies, has become intensely political. That's a place where Trump's appointees can put a thumb on the scale, even for buildings that aren't owned by Uncle Sam. In his opening remarks Thursday, Scharf — a former lawyer for Trump — alluded to the administration's preferred aesthetic: 'Classical architecture.'
During his first term, Trump issued an executive order forbidding modernist architecture in federal buildings. Progressives howled, and Biden reversed the order upon taking office. Then Trump reinstated it when he came back. Whether you prefer Ionic columns or brutalist facades, it seems, is now a culture war issue.
Conservatives have been angling for an executive order that goes even further by jettisoning the 1962 'Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture' compiled by Kennedy aide (and future senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The principles discouraged the country from having an 'official style' and instructed the government to defer to elite architects — the very people that traditionalists accuse of foisting ugly modern buildings on the public in the name of being cutting-edge.
Practically speaking, though, exerting maximal control over the agencies that have say-so over the look of Washington — the Planning Commission, the Old Georgetown Board and the Commission of Fine Arts — will allow the administration to do the almost same thing.
And they'll have a lot to do: The DOGE-inspired plans to abandon landmark federal agency headquarters will mean there are a lot of disused modernist government buildings to dispose of. The Planning Commission will have authority over what happens to them. Scharf declined to say what he envisions when I asked him, leaving it at 'stay tuned.' One of Trump's first-term nominees, former Commission of Fine Arts leader Justin Shubow, who shaped the initial executive order requiring classical architecture, has already weighed in: In a February op-ed, he called for demolishing the Forrestall Building, the blocky modernist structure that currently houses the Department of Energy.
Blair told me that Trump is keen on putting his visual stamp on the capital. 'He has a background as a builder,' he said. 'He's well known for his very tasteful design and very successful properties. Obviously, this is the seat of government, and is really a symbol of all civilization, certainly the Western world. And he wants to make sure that it's beautiful and it's well designed. And I think so far as he can influence that with his time here, he wants to do so.'