Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is now facing removal by Donald Trump, another obstacle in a long line she has faced and written about during her experiences as one of a small number of Black women in the field of economics.
Cook was nominated to the Fed in 2022 by then president Joe Biden after building a career that spanned both government and academia, including work at the treasury department, service in the White House, and a long record of scholarly contributions.
But her path to confirmation wasn’t without hostility. Republicans opposed her nomination, forcing Vice-President Kamala Harris to break a 50–50 Senate deadlock. That narrow vote made Cook the first, and so far the only, Black woman to serve as a Fed governor.
Her potential dismissal comes just days after federal housing finance agency director Bill Pulte alleged on social media that she falsified records and other documents to obtain favorable mortgage terms prior to her appointment. Cook has not been charged with a crime or found guilty of misconduct.
By law, governors on the Fed’s board are appointed to 14-year terms and can only be removed for “cause”, generally understood to mean corruption or serious wrongdoing. Cook has continued to push back. Last week, she declared she had “no intention of being bullied” and promised to gather “accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts”.
In a statement on Tuesday, she insisted that “no cause exists under the law, and he [Trump] has no authority” to strip her of the seat she has held since 2022. Her attorney has said they intend to sue.
Since joining the board, Cook has consistently voted in line with chair Jerome Powell, supporting last year’s decision to cut interest rates and this year’s decision to hold them steady. She is sometimes described as a “dove”, a label economists use for officials who lean toward lower rates.
Cook was born in Georgia, where she was raised by a hospital chaplain and a nursing professor. She and her sisters were among the first Black students to integrate their schools.
She went on to study at Spelman College, then Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, before earning her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.
Her academic work often linked economics with the realities of race and discrimination. One of her most recognized works, Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American patents, described how lynchings and other acts of racial violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s drastically reduced patent activity among Black inventors.
Cook has also written candidly about the challenges she has faced in her profession. In a 2019 opinion piece in the New York Times, she and a co-author argued that “economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women”.
She added: “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”
