Trump Is Preparing to Illegally Fire the Fed Chair For Refusing to Mess with Interest Rates to Goose Economic Growth

Jul 17, 2025

When the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump could arbitrarily fire board members of regulatory agencies, invalidating laws passed by Congress to guarantee their independence, the court hinted that the status of the Federal Reserve is different. Naturally, it looks like Trump will put this to the test.

The New York Times reports:

President Trump showed off a draft of a letter firing the chair of Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, during a meeting with roughly a dozen House Republicans on Tuesday night, polling them as to whether he should do it and indicating that he likely would, according to two people briefed on the meeting. …
Presidents are unable to remove officials at the Fed without cause, a protection that was bolstered by the Supreme Court in a ruling in May regarding Mr. Trump’s ability to unseat certain members of government agencies stipulated as independent by Congress.
Cause has typically meant malfeasance or gross misconduct, rather than a disagreement on the direction of monetary policy. No president has attempted to fire a Fed chair in modern history.
“President Trump lacks the legal authority to fire Chair Powell under the pretext of his dissatisfaction with the Fed’s building renovations,” said Peter Conti-Brown, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

This is not merely about Trump’s pursuit of a “unitary executive” that gives him autocratic power over agencies that Congress designated as independent from the immediate whims of the president. Paired with Trump’s insistence on setting and resetting tariffs at will, it also shows his desire for arbitrary power over the economy.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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