Trump's bid to sack Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook rejected by Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court dealt Trump a second blow on Monday after it refused in a 5-4 ruling to let him fire Cook.

If his bid had been approved, it would have made him the first president to remove a Federal Reserve Governor since the central bank was created in 1913.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said Trump "failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her."

The Federal Reserve's governors "do not serve at the president’s pleasure - they instead serve staggered 14 year terms, and may be removed only 'for cause,'" Roberts added.

Trump last August had cited unproven mortgage fraud allegations in trying to oust Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, while she called that a pretext to remove her for monetary policy differences.

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The justices denied a request from Trump's Justice Department to lift a judge's order barring ​him from immediately firing Cook while her legal challenge to the termination continues to play out. Cook denied Trump's allegations.

Cook's term in the job was due to run until 2038. She was appointed by Democratic former President Joe Biden in 2022.

Trump's targeting of Cook and ‌a separate criminal investigation his administration launched in January, but later dropped, against then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell together represented the biggest challenge to the central bank's independence since its founding.

It was deemed an unprecedented move and just one of many examples of how Trump is testing the limits of presidential power in his second term.

The Fed is the world's most important central bank, an institution that determines the cost of credit for the United States and beyond and which has been in Trump's crosshairs since his return to the presidency in January 2025.

Monday’s ruling follows the February 20 decision by Supreme Court justices in another case with major economic ramifications to strike down most of Trump's sweeping global tariffs, sparking a furious backlash from the president.

Trump was dealt another blow by the court on Monday as it rejected his bid to overturn a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll.

The president has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had raped her in around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.

He denied Carroll's claims and alleged that she lied about the accusations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 when he was out of office.

In 2023, a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the former magazine columnist and then defaming her.

Justices turned away Trump's appeal and rejected his arguments that the trial was unfair because the judge impermissibly let jurors hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.