Who is Lisa Cook, the US Fed Governor Trump is trying to fire?
WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump late on Aug 25 said he would
fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook
for alleged mortgage fraud.
The announcement, in a letter to Dr Cook that Mr Trump posted on Truth Social, followed a campaign of threats against her from the administration and its allies and comes as the president seeks to ramp up his pressure on the US central bank to cut interest rates.
Here’s some background on Dr Cook.
Dr Cook serves on the seven-member board of governors, which together with five of the 12 reserve bank presidents makes up the interest-rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.
She became the first Black woman appointed to the board in the Fed’s more than 100-year history when President Joe Biden nominated her in 2022.
That was to a term ending in 2024.
Mr Biden then reappointed her to a new 14-year term, which she is now serving in and which will expire in 2038.
Dr Cook has a doctorate degree in economics, common for Fed officials, and was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University before joining the central bank.
Her research has focused on international central banks, financial crises, racial economic disparities and the impacts of innovation on the economy.
Dr Cook also served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and, in the early 2000s, at the Treasury Department.
Dr Cook joined the Fed at a time when it was embarking on the most aggressive rate-hike campaign in 40 years in an effort to thwart surging inflation.
She has voted with the majority of the FOMC, and Chair Jerome Powell, at each meeting since joining the institution, including the five gatherings so far in 2025 where policymakers kept rates on hold.
Weary of still-high inflation, Dr Cook also called the latest jobs report – which showed a dramatic slowdown in hiring this summer – “concerning,” adding that such a cooling could signal an inflection point for the US economy.
She has not recently said whether she would support a rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September, which investors and central bank watchers are increasingly betting on.
Dr Cook faced an aggressive, Republican-led campaign against her during her Senate confirmation process.
Critics including former Senator Pat Toomey and Senator Bill Hagerty questioned her research background, arguing that her work had focused too much on racial policies and not enough on monetary theory.
Mr Hagerty also accused her of lying on her resume, an argument peddled by right-wing media sites and on a much-maligned anonymous economics forum, and which she strongly refuted.
In 2022, Dr Cook was confirmed on a party-line vote in the Senate, with Vice-President Kamala Harris stepping in to break the 50-50 tie.
Dr Cook, a Georgia native whose family was active in the Civil Rights movement – her uncle Samuel DuBois Cook was a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and a prominent political scientist – has written frequently about how her background has shaped her life and work.
In a New York Times op-ed piece titled “It was a mistake for me to choose this field,” Dr Cook and co-author Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman wrote about the challenges faced by Black women entering economics.
Few choose to enter the profession – just four of the 492 economics doctorate degrees conferred to women in 2023 went to Black women – and even fewer remain due to discrimination in publication citations, Dr Cook and Ms Opoku-Agyeman wrote.
Dr Cook wrote a paper about the impact of lynchings on patent applications, finding that the killing of Black Americans suppressed the total number of patents that likely would have existed had those people survived.
Dr Cook’s expertise in that area of economics has distinguished her among policymakers.
Since joining the Fed, Dr Cook has given speeches about artificial intelligence, innovation and productivity – which the economics profession is grappling with as new technologies impact the workforce and other aspects of the economy. BLOOMBERG