Amid rising tensions between the Trump White House and the Federal Reserve Board, President Donald Trump's top budget official has begun pointedly questioning the honesty of Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, twice declined to vouch for Powell's character, in addition to questioning his competence.
Asked point blank if he and Trump regard the chair as "an honest man," Vought replied: "I think that's a question that needs to be borne out by the review of the facts and what we find... We heard what he said in committee. We've seen his response to our letter. We're not there yet in terms of his response being the end of the query."
Vought said the question of Powell's honesty "is in the wash" right now due to claims the chair has made in connection with the nearly $3 billion renovation the central bank has undertaken at its headquarters across from the World War II Memorial.
"What we have tried to do is to get a handle on the claims that Chairman Powell has made and to assess whether those in fact are true," Vought told Newsmax in an interview conducted via Zoom from the director's suite of offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Vought observed that the Fed had recently advanced the "new claim" that its renovation project is not governed by the National Capital Planning Commission.
"That's not anywhere in statute," Vought said, adding: "That's certainly not the process they went through in 2021 to get approval for these buildings."
Vought pointed to other filings as potentially misleading.
"When you say that there are no longer private dining rooms, but you have called certain conference rooms 'meal-ready meeting rooms,' those are in fact dining rooms," Vought said.
Contacted by Newsmax on Monday morning, a spokesperson for the chair declined to comment and referred Newsmax to earlier statements and press releases.
Separately, Vought insisted his office, which managed the work of DOGE in slashing the size of the federal workforce and locating "waste, fraud, and abuse" in federal spending, had also targeted what many call "the Deep State."
Such efforts stemmed from a broader effort, the director explained, against what he called "woke, wasteful, and weaponized" expenditures, with weaponization discerned "throughout the federal government."
"So all of the funding that we have identified has some feature to one of those three characteristics," Vought said. "And that could be fair-housing networks that aren't just there to enforce civil rights laws but are there to have an entire network of nonprofits that go out there and destabilize and promulgate against single-family neighborhoods."
Vought held the same all-powerful position during the first Trump administration, and in both terms relied on the counsel of Mark Paoletta, a seasoned veteran of Supreme Court nominations and other Capitol Hill battles, as OMB's general counsel.
Asked how Trump processes complex budgeting data – published reports have widely portrayed the chief executive as one who prefers visual demonstrations over traditional briefing papers and memoranda – Vought said it was a mix, with singular results.
"I've never seen a person who gets as smart on an issue as the president," Vought told Newsmax.
"We deal with very complicated issues. He takes it from all sides. He gets up to speed on these issues, and he ends up knowing more than the briefers over time on their issues, and he retains that information and uses it back."
"So he actually reads briefing papers, he reads memoranda?" this reporter asked.
"Of course he reads papers," Vought replied. "I've never seen someone that consumes more information in all different ways than the president.
"And he's got a sixth sense of about it. He's got a common sense that I think is incredible in getting to the rub of an issue and understanding and being able to visualize what often you don't get from the papers in this town from the memorandums that lack the real world expertise that comes from someone with his background and his skill set."
James Rosen is Newsmax chief Washington correspondent.
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