The US supreme court ruled that Donald Trump cannot fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve without cause. The decision leaves her on the Fed’s board for now and centers on a seat whose 14-year term runs until 2038.
Cook, a Biden appointee and the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board, sued the Trump administration after Trump said he had fired her over mortgage fraud allegations. The court said, in its ruling, that Trump does not have the constitutional authority to fire a Fed governor without cause.
Lisa Cook and the Fed seat
Last August, Trump abruptly fired Cook on social media after saying he had evidence that she committed mortgage fraud. Cook denied the allegations and challenged the removal in court. The ruling keeps the question of her board seat in place for now, which matters because the Fed sets interest rates.
Cook’s term is scheduled to expire in 2038, so the court’s decision protects a seat that would otherwise have been removed nearly a decade and a half before its end. Jerome Powell stayed on as a Fed governor while Kevin Warsh replaced him as chair in May, adding another leadership change around the same institution.
Trump and removal power
The court’s language narrowed Trump’s power over the Fed, but it did not leave him without removal power in every independent agency case. In the same period, the court allowed him to remove a Democratic-appointed member of the National Labor Relations Board and stripped lower district courts of the power to issue nationwide injunctions.
The ruling also came as the court stayed a lower court order restricting Immigration and Custom Enforcement from using race and ethnicity as the basis for reasonable suspicion in immigration enforcement. For Cook, the practical result is simple: she remains on the Federal Reserve board unless a separate legal step changes that outcome.
The opinion leaves Trump unable to push Cook off the board without cause, and that is the operative rule for this dispute. The fight now shifts from whether he can remove her at will to whether any future attempt can meet the cause standard the court applied here.
