Hilariously, the Fed admits that one of the factors for the revised costs is "differences over time between original estimates and actual costs of materials, equipment, and labor." Translation: "Looks like we're not so good at forecasting and stabilizing future price inflation."

At this point, extravagant government boondoggles are barely newsworthy. A few people batted their eyelashes last week at Trump's proposal to expand military funding by half a trillion dollars but everyone has forgotten about it now because it was last week and attention spans are measured in seconds these days.

But the Fed's building renovations are causing more of a stir. Senator Tim Scott questioned Powell about it last June, and now the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas about Powell's answers. Powell responded with an uncharacteristically blunt message, saying that the DOJ's actions are a pretext – that this is all a part of a plot, led by Trump, to diminish Fed independence in its monetary policy decisions.

Of course, Fed independence is a myth—a joke, really—as Ryan McMaken ably demonstrates:

The Fed is many things, but a servant of the common man or "the public" is not one of them. Central banks exist to keep borrowing costs low for governments, and to augment government revenue by extracting more wealth from the population in the form of the inflation tax. The idea that central bankers pore over economic reports to dispassionately determine the "best" policy for "the public" is pure propaganda.