Supreme Court Says Trump Can’t Fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook

The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to seize control of the Federal Reserve on Monday in a 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, finding that he could not fire Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook based solely on made-up charges of mortgage fraud.

The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson denies the Trump administration’s request to stay a lower court order that prevented Trump from removing Cook.

That is where the decision ends. But Roberts also argued that Trump’s further arguments — that the president’s power to fire Federal Reserve board governors for cause is not reviewable by courts and that there is a low bar to prove cause for such firings — are not likely to succeed.

“To accept any one of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment — an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” Roberts writes.

In a bid to take control of the Federal Reserve, Trump purported to fire Cook on Aug. 25, 2025. When Congress created the Federal Reserve, it stipulated the president could only fire board governors for cause and not for policy disagreements — an effort to insulate the economic regulators from political concerns.

Trump claimed that mortgage fraud claims against Cook, dredged up by Federal Housing Finance Agency Chair Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist, amounted to cause for her firing. Cook’s removal would provide Trump an opportunity to appoint a new board governor, one who would be more likely to pursue Trump’s desired policy of lowering interest rates. Those claims against Cook, however, have been discredited.

Cook sued to remain in her seat. A district court judge ruled that Trump could not fire Cook as “conduct that occurred before they began in office” cannot be used as a reason for a president to fire a governor for cause. After the D.C. appeals court then declined to stay that order, which allowed her to stay in her position, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.

The arguments before the court in January did not go well for Trump. Multiple conservative justices scoffed at the idea that the president could circumvent the board’s for-cause removal protections by inventing a cause.

“It incentivizes a president to come up with … trivial or inconsequential or old allegations that are difficult to disprove,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, said.

The final ruling, however, explicitly said it was narrowly tailored to the question of whether Cook had been afforded due process, affirming she was entitled to the ability to respond to her firing.

“The Court decides this application on the narrow ground that the President 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,” Roberts wrote.

“Whether a Governor should be ‘removed for cause’ is a decision only the President can make (short of impeachment). But that does not mean that he may make that decision for any reason, or no reason,” the decision added.

The ruling in Cook’s case came the same day the court struck down for-cause protections in another similar case, Trump v. Slaughter. In March 2025, Trump had fired Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee, for no stated reason. Slaughter challenged her firing under the precedent of Humphrey’s Executor, which asserted that officials for independent agencies could only be removed for cause. In that 1935 case, the Supreme Court had affirmed the independence of the agencies by protecting their officials from being removed at the whim of a president.

Slaughter was a huge win for the Trump administration’s interpretation of unitary executive theory, which seeks to centralize all the powers of the executive branch directly in the hands of the president. The theory has been a guiding light for the Trump administration in his second term, undermining the traditional separation of powers between branches of government.

In the ruling in Slaughter, which was also authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the court’s majority stated that the for-cause removal provision “is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”

“What text, history, and structure settle, our precedent confirms—the President may remove his subordinates at will,” Roberts wrote. The ruling went further, explicitly overturning Humphrey’s Executor.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale,” Roberts wrote later in the decision.

However, the ruling in Cook carved out the notable exception of for-cause protections for the Federal Reserve as constitutional — citing the need to keep economic interests stable.

“The protection from removal enjoyed by Governors of the Federal Reserve is consistent with the Constitution. The Founders knew from experience the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy,” the opinion in Cook read.