# Federal Reserve The **Federal Reserve** is the central bank of the United States, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It conducts monetary policy (principally by setting the federal funds rate target), regulates and supervises banks, maintains financial stability, and acts as lender of last resort. Its structure is deliberately insulated from the political cycle: a seven-member Board of Governors serving staggered 14-year terms, twelve regional Reserve Banks, and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets interest-rate policy. Governors are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but the long terms and the for-cause removal protection are designed so that no single administration can capture monetary policy. ## Current leadership (2026) **[[Kevin Warsh]]** is the 17th Chair of the Federal Reserve, sworn in on May 22, 2026, after a narrow 54–45 Senate confirmation on May 13 (almost entirely party-line, with only Senator John Fetterman crossing over). His four-year term as chair runs to May 2030. He succeeded **[[Jerome Powell]]**, whose term as chair ended in May 2026 but who has chosen to remain on the Board of Governors as a governor — a pointed decision that keeps the previous chair in the building and denies the administration an additional board seat to fill. Warsh, a former Fed governor (2006–2011) long associated with hawkish-then-dovish shifts and sharp criticism of Powell-era policy, chaired his first FOMC meeting on June 16–17, 2026. ## The independence fight For the knowledge base, the Fed is the front line of the broader **independence fight** over whether nominally autonomous bodies can resist a president determined to control them. Several threads converge here: - **Pressure for lower rates.** Sustained public pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates, and personal attacks on the chair, broke the long-standing norm against White House interference in monetary policy. - **The removal question.** The contested constitutional question of whether a president may fire a Fed governor at will — long assumed settled in the Fed's favor by the for-cause protections that survived even *Seila Law* and *Humphrey's Executor* litigation — became live, with the Fed widely seen as the ultimate target of the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] campaign against [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]]. - **The Warsh transition itself.** Installing a more administration-aligned chair through the ordinary appointment process is the "legitimate" route to influence the Fed; the narrowness and partisanship of the confirmation signalled how contested even that route has become. The 2026 Powell-to-Warsh transition is the most consequential central-bank leadership change in a generation, both for monetary policy and as a test case in the larger struggle over the autonomy of the administrative state. ## Why it matters Central-bank independence is one of the load-bearing assumptions of the neoliberal economic order (see [[Neoliberalism]]) — the idea that inflation control should be delegated to insulated technocrats rather than left to elected officials with short-term incentives. An administration that succeeds in bending the Fed to its will would not merely change interest rates; it would dismantle a pillar of the post-1979 economic-governance consensus and remove one of the last institutional checks operating independently of electoral politics. ## See Also - [[Kevin Warsh]] — current (17th) chair, sworn in May 2026 - [[Jerome Powell]] — predecessor, remaining as governor - [[Interest Rate Policy Timeline]] — the history of the Fed's rate decisions and the pressure on them, 1913–2026 - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] — the constitutional argument against Fed independence - [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] — the broader category under pressure - [[Federal Agencies]] — parent map