Lisa Cook, governor of the US Federal Reserve, at The Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025.
Aaron Schwartz | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will hear oral arguments in the case challenging President Donald Trump’s authority to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook on Jan. 21.
Trump said on Aug. 25 that he was firing Cook, one of seven Fed governors, citing claims that she committed mortgage fraud in connection with two residences that she owns.
Cook, who denies any wrongdoing, filed a lawsuit seeking to block her removal.
A federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., in early September ruled that Cook could not be fired from the board while her suit was pending.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia soon after upheld that ruling, leading Trump to ask the Supreme Court to rule on his power to fire her.
In the initial ruling blocking Cook’s removal, District Court Judge Jia Cobb wrote, “Cook has made a strong showing that her purported removal was done in violation of the Federal Reserve Act’s ‘for cause’ provision.”
“The best reading” of that provision is that legal cause for removing a Fed governor is limited to actions related to their “behavior in office,” Cobb wrote.
The allegations against Cook relate to conduct that predates her serving on the Fed.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who is representing the Trump administration in the case, has argued in a filing with the Supreme Court that the president should be allowed to remove her while her suit is pending because she does not have “a Fifth Amendment property interest in her continued service as a Governor of the Federal Reserve System.”
Sauer also wrote that although the Federal Reserve Act rules out removal for “no reason at all, or for policy disagreement … so long as the President identifies a cause, the determination of ‘some cause relating to the conduct, ability, fitness, or competence of the officer’ is within the President’s unreviewable discretion.”
Trump tried to fire Cook, who is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors, after months of unsuccessfully pressuring the board and Fed Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates.
