The Supreme Court left the door open for President Donald Trump to try firing Federal Reserve officials even as it blocked him from removing Fed Gov. Lisa Cook over mortgage fraud allegations.
Justices ruled this morning that the president can dismiss members of most independent agencies without cause, but that the US central bank is different — and that besides, the administration had denied Cook due process. But the majority skirted the question of what, exactly, could serve as grounds for future Fed firings, writing that it “need not fully demarcate the contours of ‘cause’ today.”
“It remains to be seen if [Trump] tried to take a second swing at removing a Fed governor … how he would fare in that case,” said Graham Steele, a former Biden-era Treasury Department official. “So the issues on the Fed, to me, are not fully put to bed.”
Said University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Conti-Brown: The court “is now in the position of procrastinators everywhere: Let’s let future SCOTUS handle that one.”
Trump is already signaling a desire to try again, describing the Supreme Court’s decision as “strictly procedural” and pledging to “take appropriate action immediately.”
“This ruling [on Cook] did very little to protect the Fed,” Kitty Richards, another former Biden-era Treasury official, said. “These are still dark days for Fed independence.”