Warren Statement on Trump Fed Nominee Stephen Miran
“Dr. Miran’s nomination is just the next phase of President Trump’s very public months-long campaign to stack the Fed with loyalists.”
“President Trump is trying to seize personal control of the Fed in an attempt to escape accountability for his own economic failures. And Senate Republicans are facilitating it.”
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, gave remarks before an executive session vote on the Trump administration’s nomination of Dr. Stephen Miran to be a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
In her remarks, Ranking Member Warren criticized President Trump for attempting to take over the Fed – and Republican Senators for refusing to stop him. In Miran’s previous responses to Ranking Member Warren’s Questions for the Record, he failed to demonstrate his independence from Trump.
Below is Ranking Member Warren’s opening statement:
Senator Warren: President Trump is trying to seize personal control of the Fed in an attempt to escape accountability for his own economic failures. And Senate Republicans are facilitating it.
Donald Trump promised to lower costs “on day one.” But costs are up. He promised a golden age for American workers. Instead, he’s wrecked the job market.
Donald Trump has the ability to stem the bleeding. But rather than change his tariff policies, reverse his disastrous energy policies, and restore the health care coverage that he has just ripped away from 15 million Americans, Trump wants to make the Fed his economic scapegoat. Dr. Miran’s nomination is just the next phase of President Trump’s very public months-long campaign to stack the Fed with loyalists.
When Trump seizes control, Fed decisions won’t be driven by data but by Donald Trump’s personal feelings. And when the Fed loses credibility, businesses and consumers stop trusting it to control inflation, and prices go up. It happened when President Nixon bullied the Fed and forced prices up for a decade. And it’s happened overseas when dictators have seized control of their central banks.
Dr. Miran has already spectacularly failed every independence test that we could think of:
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He could not say the words “Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.” Dr. Miran will be the first admitted election denier to sit on the Federal Board.
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He is refusing to resign his current White House job. That is ridiculous - one day of serving as the President’s chief economist and a supposedly independent Governor at the Fed would be one day too many. And let’s be 100% clear: we are not voting on a four-month term at the Fed. Dr. Miran has also indicated he could sit in that seat indefinitely after his term expires in January of next year.
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Dr. Miran’s so-called ‘leave of absence’ is a bad joke. He will be sitting down the street from the White House, and he has refused to disclose any communications he has with the President or the White House while he’s at the Fed.
This nomination sets up an obvious Trump loyalty test for Dr. Miran. He knows that every vote he takes determines whether he can go back to his White House job. That is not independence – that is servitude. He will have zero credibility with markets, zero credibility with businesses, and zero credibility with the public if he is confirmed to the Board under these circumstances.
This nomination is a Trump loyalty test for Republican Senators too. Every Senator who spoke at Dr. Miran’s confirmation hearing said they supported Fed independence. If it’s true that you believe in independence, then you should vote no.
And I know it’s not easy. It wasn’t easy for me when I voted against President Biden’s choice to run the Fed. But we were not sent here to serve the President. We were sent here to serve the people of our states. And if we refuse to do that today, we are sentencing those same constituents to years of potentially higher prices and higher unemployment.
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