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Trump's attack on Lisa Cook is an attack on Black women
We all stand to lose if he gets away with it.
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On August 20, news broke that Governor Lisa Cook is being probed for “mortgage fraud” by Attorney General Bondi. Since then, the president has issued multiple statements about his unprecedented plans to fire Governor Cook, and a criminal investigation of her has been officially launched by the Department of Justice.
It’s clear one of the primary reasons the president wants to oust Governor Lisa Cook is because of his fixation on interest rate cuts. He sees her as standing in his way. With Cook’s removal, Trump would have an opportunity to nominate a new and more pliant replacement.
It should be noted that a sitting president has never removed a Board Governor in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history. And more importantly, many economists, over 500 and counting, have expressed alarm that such a move would endanger the Federal Reserve’s independence from political whims. In their own words, firing Cook “threatens the fundamental principle of central bank independence and undermines trust in one of America’s most important institutions.” Trust, they assert, ensures the economic leadership of the US in the global economy.
Alongside concerns of Fed independence, many have wondered why Cook is the one being targeted in the first place. After all, her qualifications speak for themselves.
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Cook is arguably one of the most recognizable faces in economic policy and the most prominent Black woman economist. She graduated from Spelman College with high honors, Oxford University as a Spelman’s first Marshall Scholar, and earned her PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley, a top economics school. She achieved tenure at Michigan State University as a professor of economics and international relations and later served on the Biden-Harris transition team prior to her nomination to the Fed Board. Her time in economic policy also includes working for the US Treasury and White House as well as the Federal Reserve system, where she’s held positions across four of the 12 banks — New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.
On the Federal Reserve Board, Governor Cook has been among the first to publicly sound the alarm on the importance of understanding artificial intelligence in shaping our economy. That’s of a piece with her previous work on innovation and inequality as well as her experience on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. Her expertise seems to be a good fit with the Trump’s focus on AI. So why is she being targeted by the administration?
As a Black woman in economics, and the author of “The Double Tax: How Women of Color are Overcharged and Underpaid” (coming September 16), I know that part of what’s going on with Governor Cook has to do with the ongoing mistreatment Black women in economics face.
Back in 2017, Governor Cook and I authored an an op-ed in the New York Times titled “It Was a Mistake for Me to Choose this Field.” In the piece, we discussed how the disproportionate harassment and discrimination Black women face in the economics discipline as well as the severe underrepresentation we experience. Since writing the piece, the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession reported in 2024 that only four Black women graduated with doctoral degrees in economics among 1,385 graduates, or nearly 0.3 percent of doctoral recipients.