The conservative majority Supreme Court, which has spent a year rewarding the Trump administration with executive power, indicated on Wednesday that granting the president unfettered control over the nation’s central bank could be a step too far.
Most of the high court’s nine judges showed deep unease over the way President Donald Trump has tried to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook over unsettled allegations that she lied on mortgage application forms nearly a year before she took office in 2022. The court spent much of the hearing closely scrutinizing the White House’s justifications and stance that it couldn’t even be questioned by the judicial branch.
The stakes for independent government agencies couldn’t be higher. The Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and even seized the legislative branch’s Institute of Peace before reaching the central bank, whose independence from everyday politics has been long considered sacrosanct by Congress and economists who point to centuries of currency mismanagement worldwide.