Who is Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve governor targeted by Trump?

Before she was targeted by President Donald Trump, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook published research centering on race and inequality and advocated for other Black women in economics. 

Trump on Monday said he intended to fire Cook, who in 2022 was confirmed as the first Black woman to serve on the independent Federal Reserve Board, which sets U.S. monetary policy and regulates financial markets. Over 100 people have served as governors on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board since it was founded in 1913. Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said Tuesday that she would file a lawsuit challenging Trump’s attempt to dismiss her.

Trump’s move is the latest and most drastic escalation yet in his attempts to pressure the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Trump has also aggressively targeted Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, who last week indicated that the board could cut interest rates at its upcoming September 16 meeting. 

 In his letter dismissing Cook, Trump cited allegations that Cook engaged in “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct” of mortgage fraud by listing two residencies as her primary residence on loan applications. Cook has not been charged or convicted with any wrongdoing in connection to the allegations, which relate to applications she submitted before her service on the Federal Reserve. Trump’s allies have levied similar accusations against other perceived political opponents, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff of California. 

A president can only fire a member of the Board of Governors for “cause,” which has been interpreted to refer to gross misconduct in office. In a Monday statement issued through Lowell, Cook said she would not step down and there was “no cause” for Trump to try to fire her. 

“I will not resign,” she said. “I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”

Much of Cook’s economic research has centered on international economics, particularly the post-Soviet Russian and Nigerian economies, and on race in America, including the impacts of lynchings and segregation and the history of Black innovation. 

One of her best-known papers found that violent lynchings of Black Americans between 1870 and 1940 reduced the number of patents awarded to Black inventors. Cook has written and co-authored other research papers and articles on the links between segregation and lynchings, the mortality consequences of distinctively Black names, and causes and ramifications of current gender and racial disparities in innovation and patent filings. 

Before then-President Joe Biden appointed her to the Federal Reserve, Cook was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. She served on the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama administration and in the Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs from 2000 to 2001. She attended Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college, and Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, later earning her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

“I spent my childhood in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the midst of the rural, desegregating South,” she said in her 2023 congressional nomination hearing for a full term on the Board of Governors. “My dedication to public service was invigorated by observing the courage and resolve of my late parents and other members of my family. We stood alongside friends and neighbors whose names were never recorded, and others, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose memories are engraved in our nation’s history.”

Cook has also advocated for women and people of color in economics, including in her role directing the American Economic Association’s Summer Training Program from 2018 to 2021. Black women are heavily underrepresented in the White and man-dominated profession of economics, which in turn has led to underrepresentation on decision-making bodies like the Federal Reserve. 

In 2019, Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, then a pre-doctoral student, published a New York Times op-ed highlighting the barriers facing Black women in economics, which include discrimination, harassment and inequality in publication citations. Opoku-Agyeman, a doctoral student at Harvard Kennedy School, later co-founded the Sadie Collective, an organization focused on growing the pipeline for Black women in economics and related fields. It’s named for Dr. Sadie T.M. Alexander, who in 1921 became the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics.  

Alexander, they wrote in the op-ed, “switched to law because of the racism and sexism she encountered. A century later the experience of black female economists is disturbingly similar.”

Congressional Democrats and advocates were swift to condemn Trump’s move to fire Cook, the latest in a series of prominent Black women singled out by the administration.  

“Dr. Lisa Cook is the first Black woman ever to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement. “Donald Trump is trying to remove her without a shred of credible evidence that she has done anything wrong.”

Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said Trump’s attempt to fire Cook was “further evidence of his strategy to illegally dismantle a politically independent body he cannot control.” 

“Time and time again, the president has targeted Black women leaders and has tried to push them out of positions of power,” she said. “As prices continue to rise and his public approval falls, Trump is trying to distract the nation from his failures by removing the experts and replacing them with political loyalists who will blindly carry out his destructive agenda, whatever the cost to our nation and to working families.”