Donald Trump threatened to fire Jerome Powell if he stays on as US Federal Reserve chair past the end of his tenure and doubled down on a criminal investigation into renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.
As the White House pushes Trump’s new nominee to take charge of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, Powell has a month left in the role. The possibility of Powell staying on as chair past 15 May, the official end of his term, has grown amid mounting scrutiny of Trump’s approach to the Fed in the Senate, which is required to approve Warsh’s nomination.
“I’ll have to fire him, OK, if he’s not leaving on time,” Trump said of Powell during an interview on Fox Business. “I’ve held back firing him. I wanted to fire him, but I had to be controversial, you know? I want to be uncontroversial.”
Trump reiterated his claim that Powell is doing a “bad job” and that “he should be lowering interest rates” – an argument Trump has made repeatedly since returning to office in January 2025, placing him on a collision course with the slow, careful approach taken by Powell and other economists at the Fed.
Trump threatens to fire Fed chair Jerome Powell amid pressure campaign
Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina and a member of the banking committee, said he will block Trump’s nominee to succeed Powell until the Department of Justice ends its criminal investigation into Powell over renovations at the Fed’s headquarters in Washington DC. Tillis has said that he supports Warsh’s nomination but said the Powell investigation is “reaching the point of absurd”.
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