A long-awaited report from the Federal Reserve’s inspector general has concluded that the central bank inadequately supervised its multi-billion-dollar headquarters renovation, allowing top officials — including then-Chair Jerome Powell — to escape direct accountability for how the project was run. The findings, released this week, drew sharply different reactions from the financial press and from the Fed’s new leadership, according to Breitbart’s Business Digest.
The report lands in the middle of an ongoing political fight over the Fed’s independence, interest rate policy, and the renovation itself. Powell had previously characterized a Justice Department investigation into the project as a pretext aimed at influencing monetary policy — a claim that much of the legacy financial press treated as self-evidently true even though no one could quite explain the mechanism.
Now, the inspector general’s findings counsel against the clean exoneration narrative. According to the report, the project’s supervision was structured in a way that insulated senior officials from responsibility. Powell was not found to have embezzled funds or committed a crime, but the watchdog’s conclusion that top officials simply did not personally oversee the work is not the same thing as a clean bill of health, Breitbart argues.
‘Vindication’ or Repudiation?
Many in the financial press framed the absence of criminal findings as a vindication of Powell, a reading Breitbart’s Business Digest calls bizarre. “You can’t pin the blame on top officials because they didn’t actually supervise things,” the Digest writes, “is not quite the exoneration some journalists think.”
The Fed’s new leadership appears to have read the report in a different light. Rather than declaring the matter closed, incoming leadership under Kevin Warsh announced serious reforms to the supervisory structure meant to eliminate the plausible deniability escape hatches the inspector general identified. Breitbart’s account characterizes that move as a stern repudiation of Powell’s supervisory practices — consistent with the report’s own critique.
The report and the response to it arrive as the central bank remains a central target of political attention, with the renovation saga having already produced subpoenas, congressional hearings, and an extended public back-and-forth over the Fed’s internal governance.
Jobs Report Shows Participation, Not Layoffs
The same week brought the monthly jobs numbers, and the picture underneath the headline unemployment rate looked different from what the top-line figure suggests. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the jobless rate edged up to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent. The number of unemployed rose by 78,000 to 7.1 million.
But over the same month the labor force grew by 485,000 and employment rose by 406,000. The labor force participation rate climbed to 61.8 percent from 61.6 percent, and the employment-population ratio ticked up to 59.2 percent from 59.1 percent.
The composition of the unemployment numbers supports the interpretation that rising participation — rather than an outbreak of layoffs — drove the rate higher. People who lost a job or completed a temporary assignment fell by 45,000 to 3.2 million. Permanent job losers slipped to 1.75 million. Workers on temporary layoff were essentially unchanged at 845,000.
In other words, the counts of job losers actually declined. The uptick in the unemployment rate came alongside more Americans entering the workforce — a dynamic Breitbart’s Business Digest frames as a sign of a strong economy pulling people off the sidelines.
The Female Employment Debate
For the second month in a row, some liberal commentators have raised alarms over figures showing women gaining more net jobs than men since the start of the Trump administration. Breitbart’s take is that this is a fabricated controversy. If a Democratic administration were in office, the same figures would be celebrated as progress toward workplace equality, given that men remain considerably more likely to be employed than women.
The Digest argues that liberals are operating on an unfounded assumption that conservatives secretly want a “male breadwinner economy,” and therefore read the numbers as evidence that conservatives are failing at a goal they never actually had. A more cynical reading is electoral: that liberals hope the data will drive sexist voters away from Republicans ahead of the midterms — what Breitbart describes as an attempt at “manosphere manipulation.”
What the numbers don’t show, according to the Digest, is any policy failure. The smaller net gains for men are largely explained by the decline in the foreign-born male workforce — a consequence of deportations and self-deportation — which mechanically reduces male employment totals independent of any domestic policy bias.
GDP Revised Up, and a Tariff Anniversary
The government also announced this week that the economy grew substantially faster in the first half of the year than previously estimated. The third estimate for second-quarter real GDP growth was revised up to 2.2 percent from 1.5 percent. First-quarter growth was revised to 2.5 percent from 2.1 percent.
The reasons behind the upgrades were themselves encouraging: stronger household consumption, stronger nonresidential investment, and a smaller drag from inventories. Corporate profit growth was revised down slightly but still posted the strongest quarterly jump since the reopening quarter of 2021.
Breitbart’s Business Digest uses the data to make a political point: the media has successfully convinced Republicans not to talk about the economy for fear of appearing out of touch, thereby disarming GOP candidates of one of their strongest arguments. The Digest’s advice is blunt — it’s a good economy, and Republicans should say so.
The Digest also marked a less celebratory historical anniversary: the 113th year since President Woodrow Wilson signed the Underwood-Simmons tariff legislation, which reduced tariffs while introducing the modern federal income tax under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment. The law shifted the federal government’s revenue machinery from the ports and borders toward the domestic economy. The initial basic rate was one percent above exemptions of $3,000 for individuals and $4,000 for married couples — roughly $102,000 and $135,000 in today’s dollars.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2026/10/02/breitbart-business-digest-trump-vs-powell-revisited/