The US Supreme Court refused on Monday to let Donald Trump fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook as it stood firm to preserve the central bank’s cherished independence against an unprecedented challenge by the Republican president.
The court, in a 5-4 ruling, blocked Trump from removing Cook for now, providing a safeguard for the Fed specifically, even as it boosted the president’s power over government in a separate landmark ruling on Monday. In that ruling, involving Trump’s dismissal of a Federal Trade Commission member, the court expanded presidential authority to fire leaders of other US agencies, overturning a precedent dating to 1935 in the process.
No other president since the central bank’s founding in 1913 had sought to oust a Fed governor. In his second term as president, Trump has tested the limits of presidential power in numerous other ways as well.
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Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said Trump had “failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her.”
Trump last August cited unproven mortgage fraud allegations in trying to oust Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor. Cook denied the allegations, calling them a pretext to remove her for monetary policy differences.
Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices in the ruling. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
The ruling definitively protects Fed officials from being fired at will by a president. Canvassing the history of the Federal Reserve System and its predecessor central banks since the founding, including the Bank of North America and the First and Second Banks of the United States, Roberts emphasized that all have featured independence from the president to shield monetary policy from political interference.
