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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the taxpayer accountability frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Fed independence frame
A criminal probe was being used to bully a sitting Fed chair into cutting rates, and its collapse — confirmed when prosecutors had no evidence to show even a sympathetic judge — vindicates warnings that the central bank's independence was under direct political assault.
Confirmation logjam frame
Dropping the Powell probe was the procedural key that unlocked Warsh's path to the Fed chair: with Tillis's condition met, the nomination can now clear committee and reach the floor in time for the May 15 transition.
Taxpayer accountability frame
The criminal track may be closed, but real questions about a $2.5 billion renovation and its cost overruns remain, and the Fed's own inspector general — with broader authority over the central bank — is the right venue to hold it accountable to taxpayers.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot C
The right-venue case
A fiscal oversight hawk would argue —
A $2.5 billion renovation of two buildings is not a rounding error, and the cost overruns are real regardless of whether anyone lied to a Senate committee about beehives or marble. Criminal subpoenas were always a clumsy tool for what is fundamentally a stewardship question, and a federal judge said as much. The Fed's own Inspector General has broader investigative authority over the central bank than a U.S. Attorney's grand jury does, can compel documents and testimony from Fed staff directly, and — importantly — Powell himself requested the IG review back in July. That is the proper venue to determine how a building project doubled in cost on the taxpayers' dime, and to publish findings Congress can act on.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.