Donald Trump will personally visit the Federal Reserve Thursday to tour a construction site he’s criticized for cost overruns amid his escalating attacks on Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting rates.

The White House announced the visit in the release of the president’s daily public schedule. The visit is planned for 4 p.m. reading simply, “THE PRESIDENT visits The Federal Reserve,” without further details.

In recent days, Trump has said that he did not plan to fire Powell before the end of his term, but has not fully closed the door over removing the central bank head over his handling of the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation project.

“This guy is building this building that’s severely overrun, and what does he need the building for?” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office.

Trump aides — including James Blair, the president’s deputy chief of staff, Russ Vought, his budget director, and Bill Pulte, an outspoken Powell critic who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency — have been demanding a visit to personally see the renovation project.

Blair last week turned down an offer to view the construction site at a time that overlapped with a planned meeting between the president and Senate Republicans. It’s not clear whether Trump, who had not previously publicly indicated a desire to see the site, was always planning to attend. Trump administration officials and the Fed had agreed to a visit for Thursday, Blair said Tuesday.

Now Trump is going too.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment seeking details of the visit. The Federal Reserve declined to comment.

Building dispute

Powell has called media reports about the renovations inaccurate. In recent weeks, he made a formal request for the bank’s inspector general to review the $2.5 billion restoration work.

The dispute could carry legal significance if Trump does decide to move on Powell. Presidents lack the power to remove Fed officials without cause under the law, a provision that was bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling in May on Trump’s authority to oust members of independent government agencies.

It also threatens to rattle markets by undermining longstanding norms surrounding the independence and autonomy of the central bank. For months, Powell has been under fire from Trump and his allies for leading the Fed in holding fast on interest rates — declining to continue last year’s reductions due to concern over the potential inflationary impact of the administration’s tariff hikes.

Trump, who nominated Powell in 2017, has shifted positions regularly — at points calling on him to resign, weighing whether to try to fire him, and otherwise sounding resigned to wait until Powell’s term expires in May.

Administration officials have been split over the idea of attempting to fire Powell. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday told Fox Business there was “nothing that tells me that he should step down right now.”

“His term ends in May. If he wants to see that through, I think he should. If he wants to leave early, I think he should,” Bessent said.

But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday said in a Fox News interview that Powell “has got to go” and should “either resign or be replaced.”

Presidential visits to the Fed are rare, but aren’t totally unprecedented. In 2006, Ben Bernanke welcomed President George W. Bush to the central bank’s headquarters in Washington for the then-Fed chair’s swearing-in ceremony. In his remarks, Bernanke said it was just the third presidential visit to the building ever, after Gerald Ford in 1975 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1937.