# Lisa Cook **Lisa D. Cook** is the economist — a Michigan State professor, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, a Berkeley PhD, a veteran of the Obama Council of Economic Advisers — whom Joe Biden nominated to the [[Federal Reserve]] Board in January 2021 and the Senate confirmed in May 2022, the first Black woman to serve as a governor. Her scholarship on how violence against Black Americans suppressed patenting after Reconstruction is the work the right's critics never mention; what they mention is the fight over her seat, which has become the test case of whether the President can remove a Fed governor at all. ## The removal On August 15, 2025 FHFA director [[Bill Pulte]] accused her of claiming two primary residences on 2021 mortgage documents and referred her to the Justice Department — the same accusation he had already aimed at [[Letitia James]] and Adam Schiff. Trump demanded her resignation on August 20 and announced her firing "for cause" on **August 25, 2025**, the first attempted removal of a governor in the Fed's history. Reuters, the *Post* and the *Financial Times* found that her loan estimate called the Atlanta property a vacation home, her security-clearance form called it a second home, and she had never claimed a homestead exemption there. Judge [[Jia Cobb]] enjoined the firing on September 9; the D.C. Circuit refused a stay; the Supreme Court refused one on October 1, heard argument on January 21, 2026 (Paul Clement for Cook, [[D. John Sauer]] for the President) and held 5–4 in *[[Trump v. Cook]]* on **June 29, 2026** that "for cause" requires notice and a chance to respond — which she had never had. The White House then supplied the process: a letter from deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino on **August 7, 2026** charging "gross negligence" and giving her three weeks; her lawyers' reply on August 27 that "an inadvertent error is not fraud" and that the exercise was "an attempt by President Trump to force the Federal Reserve to bend to his will." She remains in her seat and on the [[Federal Open Market Committee]], where she has voted with the majority to hold rates. ## Why she matters here Cook's case is the second term's cleanest instance of the referral-as-weapon method — a political appointee runs a database, finds a discrepancy, and a President who wants a vote on the Board calls it fraud — and of the courts' answer, which was procedural rather than substantive: the Fed is different, and the difference is a hearing. See [[Central Bank Independence]] for what the case decided and did not, and the [[DNI Succession News Log]] for the same method applied elsewhere. ## See Also - [[Trump v. Cook]] · [[Central Bank Independence]] · [[Federal Reserve]] · [[Federal Open Market Committee]] · [[Jerome Powell]] · [[Kevin Warsh]] - [[Bill Pulte]] · [[Jia Cobb]] · [[D. John Sauer]] · [[Letitia James]] · [[Trump v. Slaughter]]