Fed Chair prepared to bring suit to keep his job if Trump tries to oust him: report

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is reportedly ready to go to court to save his job if President-elect Donald Trump seeks to remove him. As The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, Trump may have considered whether to fire Powell in 2018 over a disagreement over interest rates. Powell kept raising; Trump wanted them lowered. Fed leaders are reportedly prepared for an "unprecedented legal battle—the same one Fed leaders had prepared for years ago."

If Powell does have to sue for his job, he may have to pay the costs himself. Powell concurred with Trump’s assessment of runaway illegal immigration contributing to rising employment. Trump is reportedly not enthusiastic about Powell still being the Fed chair six years later and Powell knows that. When asked last week by a reporter if he would resign if Trump asked him to, Powell insisted the answer was no. He also said no president has the authority to fire him. He said it was “not permitted under the law.”

According to The WSJ, that means Powell is ready for a legal confrontation. “If the president were to succeed at this, that would mean every future chair is subject to removal at the whim of the president,” Scott Alvarez, who was general counsel for the Federal Reserve from 2004-2017, told the WSJ. “I don’t think that’s a precedent Jay would want to set, and that’s why I think he would fight it. This is a humongous precedent.”

Powell hasn’t publicly indicated that he is hesitant about Trump’s return to the White House. Trump’s advisors aren’t sure whether the new president should press the point with Powell. Some have suggested he should name Powell’s replacement and just allow the current chairman to come to terms that his time is drawing to a close, according to the WSJ. Others want Trump to push Powell out as a means of exhibiting who’s in charge of fiscal policy in America. The fiscal libertarians surrounding Trump have always been suspicious of the Federal Reserve and Powell’s perceived arrogance is arguably playing right into their hands.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) noted Powell’s attitude and said it was time to show the Fed who’s in control. “Yet another reason why we should #EndTheFed,” he wrote on X.

In a Halloween interview, former Rep. Ron Paul was asked if he would like to work with Elon Musk in a Trump administration to reduce or eliminate government waste. Paul welcomed the idea but said it wouldn’t be an easy task to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion dollars or phase out the Federal Reserve overnight without “creating total chaos and risking a civil war and all that.”