All three living former Fed chairs—Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen—filed a Supreme Court brief on Thursday, calling on the justices to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook from her position.
The filing warned that firing Lisa during an ongoing legal challenge would “threaten that independence and erode public confidence in the Fed.”
They weren’t the only ones who signed. The brief was backed by a wide bipartisan lineup of top economic names, including ex-Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Hank Paulson, Jack Lew, and Timothy Geithner.
They said the independence of the Fed, granted within limits set by Congress, was a “critical feature of our national monetary system.” They argued the Court should not let the White House interfere with that.
Lisa is currently the target of a White House effort to reshape the Fed’s stance on interest rates. Trump wants rate cuts fast, and Lisa has been in the way.
That’s the backdrop for the president’s push to remove her. His administration is claiming he had “cause” to fire her, based on mortgage fraud accusations pushed in August by Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Authority and one of Trump’s close allies.
Trump faces legal block in firing campaign against Fed official
Lisa Cook, who has vehemently denied Pulte’s accusations, hasn’t been charged with anything. Nothing has stuck. NBC News reviewed documents in September that appeared to contradict the fraud claims altogether. But despite no formal charges, Trump still pressed forward.
Two federal courts already blocked the removal attempt. Trump didn’t back off—he escalated the matter to the Supreme Court. His administration wants the green light to fire Lisa immediately. In court filings, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the judge’s earlier decision to pause the firing was “improper judicial interference.”
The Supreme Court didn’t dismiss the case. Instead, they gave Lisa until Thursday evening to respond to Trump’s appeal.
Meanwhile, the White House is sticking to its defense. It said Lisa was “lawfully removed for cause.” It hasn’t walked that back. And it hasn’t denied that Lisa has been a target amid pressure to push the Fed into faster rate cuts.
This situation is unique. Trump is the first president in U.S. history to try and remove a sitting Fed governor. That alone raised alarms for economists. The brief filed Thursday isn’t some academic lecture. It’s a direct warning from the people who ran U.S. economic policy across multiple administrations, both Republican and Democrat.
Dan Tarullo, former Fed governor, also signed it. So did economists Ken Rogoff, Phil Gramm, and John Cochrane. From the White House Council of Economic Advisers, signers included Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, and Jason Furman.
None of these officials served in Trump’s administration. None are currently in government. But all agreed on this: removing Lisa under these conditions risks doing serious damage. They wrote, “an erosion of Fed independence could result in substantial long-term harm and inferior economic performance overall.”
Economists point to Nixon’s Fed pressure as warning
The brief didn’t just talk about today. It pointed back to the early 1970s, when President Richard Nixon leaned hard on the Fed to lower unemployment. Nixon pushed then-chair Arthur Burns to cut interest rates, and Burns didn’t resist.
The result? “The Fed made only limited efforts to maintain policy independence and, for doctrinal as well as political reasons, enabled a decade of high and volatile inflation,” the brief said.
That era ended in a deep recession and a long fight to get inflation back under control. Economists who signed the brief said this is the kind of mistake the country can’t afford to repeat.
They wrote that “there is broad consensus among economists, based on decades of macroeconomic research, that a more independent central bank will lead to lower and more stable inflation without creating higher unemployment.”
They added that “elected officials often favor lowering interest rates to boost employment, particularly leading up to an election,” but that doing so without regard to long-term effects “can instead lead to persistently higher inflation in the long-term and thus ultimately harm the national economy.”
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