By Ann Saphir
June 29 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook was the first U.S. central banker to be targeted for firing by any president. She is no stranger to being first, or to being targeted.
The daughter of a nursing professor mother and hospital chaplain father, Cook and her sisters were among the first Black students to desegregate the schools they attended in rural Milledgeville, Georgia. Cook, 61, has told interviewers she still has scars above her right eye and on her leg from beatings
she experienced during that time.
After studying philosophy and physics at Spelman College, Cook was the first graduate of that historically Black women's institution in Atlanta to win the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which funded a year's study at the University of Oxford.
HIKING UP MOUNT KILIMANJARO
Later in Senegal, Cook found herself asking questions about economics — why, for instance, did ballpoint pens there cost 100 times what they did in the United States? She made the decision to switch into the discipline after hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro with a British economist who encouraged her.
She broke another barrier when Democratic President Joe Biden nominated her in 2022 to become the first Black woman to serve on the Fed's Board of Governors, bringing what the White House said at the time would be "long overdue diversity" to the U.S. central bank. Vice President Kamala Harris cast a tie-breaking 51st vote in the U.S. Senate to secure her confirmation after a contentious approval process during which Republicans suggested Cook was unqualified and would be soft on inflation.
Republican President Donald Trump in August 2025 tried to fire her from the Fed — an institution set up by Congress to be insulated from political interference — though his action was quickly blocked by the courts, and she filed a legal challenge.
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to let Trump fire Cook, as it stood firm to preserve the central bank's independence.
Cook became a test case in Trump's unprecedented bid to assert control over the Fed and push the limits of presidential power, as well as what his critics see as an example of his trying to roll back Biden administration diversity efforts by ousting high-profile Black public officials.
A HAWKISH VOICE
Adding to the economic and political stakes of her legal challenge to Trump's action, Cook in recent months has emerged as part of a growing hawkish contingent at the Fed. New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh was appointed by Trump with the explicit expectation that he would cut interest rates. At the first Fed policymaking meeting since he became Fed chair, Warsh presided over a decision announced on June 17 to hold rates steady, and repeatedly called out the need to bring down inflation.
Cook in May told a group at Stanford University in California that she worries that AI is creating a fresh inflationary shock, and said she would support a rate hike if price pressures do not ease soon.
The event was held a block from the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution, where she was once a research fellow and where Warsh, a fellow until he became Fed chair, had recently declared that AI is a disinflationary force.
Days later, Cook attended a ceremony in Boston where former Fed chair Jerome Powell received the John F. Kennedy Library's "Profile in Courage" award for standing up to threats from the Trump administration.
Powell joined Cook in attending the January 22 arguments before the Supreme Court involving Cook's suit fighting her dismissal, and he called it the most important legal case for the Fed since its founding in 1913.
Warsh in his Senate confirmation hearing declined to defend Cook, saying it would be inappropriate to weigh in on the case since he could be a party to the matter.
A TRUMP APPOINTEE'S ALLEGATIONS
Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, asked the Justice Department last year to launch criminal investigations — called a criminal referral — against Cook and other perceived enemies of the president for alleged crimes related to their mortgages. Trump on June 2 named Pulte to become acting director of national intelligence, though he has no national security experience.
Pulte skipped over his agency's inspector general when making his accusations last year, bypassing rules meant to ensure that federal officials do not abuse their power for partisan purposes. Soon after, Trump in a social media post said that he was firing Cook for what he said were false statements on her mortgage applications.
Cook has called the allegations baseless and a pretext to fire her over monetary policy differences. The property tax authority in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was in charge of vetting Cook's claims concerning a home in that city told Reuters that she had not broken rules for tax breaks despite Pulte's allegations.
'ONE OF THE STRONGEST PEOPLE'
Before her nomination to the Fed, Cook was a Michigan State University economics professor and published research on racial disparities and the negative impact of anti-Black violence and gender inequality on innovation and economic growth.
She was an adviser on the presidential transition teams for Biden and for Barack Obama, and was a senior economist for the White House's Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2012 under Obama, who was the first Black U.S. president.
Cook received her doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, where Barry Eichengreen — who has written extensively about what is at stake when political leaders drive a central bank's policy decisions — was one of her dissertation advisers.
"I know Lisa to be careful and ethical," Eichengreen told fellow economist Paul Krugman in an interview in August 2025. "She's also one of the strongest people I know."
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Additional reporting by Marisa Taylor, Chris Prentice, Howard Schneider and Michael S. Derby; Editing by Will Dunham)
