President Donald Trump will likely get his wish that Federal Reserve nominee Stephen Miran be installed in time for the central bank’s meeting next month to decide whether to cut interest rates.
Miran, a Heritage Foundation economist and Harvard alumnus currently serving as a White House economic adviser, is on track to be installed in a Fed board of governors seat before the independent government agency’s Sept. 16 and 17 meeting.
It remains unclear whether the ambitious timeline could be tripped up by Lisa Cook, the Fed governor whom Trump fired to install Miran. Cook refuses to leave her post and has sued the president, arguing that her attempted ouster over allegations from a Trump official of mortgage fraud is without cause because it’s based on an unsubstantiated accusation.
Nevertheless, Miran’s nomination is shaping up to be a proxy war over the effort to replace Cook with a Trump ally more friendly to his view that the Fed should aggressively slash interest rates.
Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee are demanding that Miran’s confirmation hearing, slated for Sept. 4, be indefinitely postponed pending a legal decision over a firing they criticized as a bid to “unlawfully remove” Cook.
“The Senate should not consider any nominee to the Federal Reserve during this unprecedented attempt to undermine its independence,” Democrats on the panel wrote to its chairman, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
Democrats can delay Miran’s confirmation, but lack the power or votes to block it.
Under committee rules, any member can postpone advancing a nominee for one week. That means Miran could be advanced as early as Sept. 11, and GOP leadership could hold the first full-chamber procedural vote on Sept. 12. Senators may be required to hold a rare Friday vote, but they would still be on track to approve Miran in the nick of time by Sept. 16, even with delay tactics by Democrats.
A move that could further bolster Republicans’ timeline is the consideration by GOP senators to go “nuclear” and change chamber rules to speed up the confirmation processes that Democrats have drawn out with other nominees during Trump’s second term.
The fate of Cook, a Senate-confirmed Biden nominee, remained in limbo heading into the weekend. A court hearing on Friday on her lawsuit concluded without a ruling from the judge on whether she can temporarily keep her position until a final determination.
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In a court filing, the Fed remained neutral. It declined to advocate on either party’s behalf but lobbied the judge for a “prompt ruling by this Court to remove the existing cloud of uncertainty” on Cook’s request to remain on the job while the case plays out.
The Fed and Chairman Jerome Powell are codefendants in her lawsuit because they would be tasked with enforcing the termination.
