UPDATE (Sept. 9, 2025, 10:10 p.m. ET): On Tuesday night, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order blocking the firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. Cook will be allowed to continue working while her case works its way through the courts.
President Donald Trump may have reduced the powers of independent agencies, but it’s unclear if he’ll succeed in gaining more control over the Federal Reserve.
Since starting his second term in January, Trump has sought to remove guardrails put in place decades ago to insulate some government agencies from political interference.
That includes the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates consumer protection; the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees TV broadcasting; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which monitors workplace discrimination; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer watchdog.
In some cases, Trump has attempted to fire board members whose terms had not yet expired or appointed new heads who are opposed to the traditional mission of the agency. In other cases, he’s sought to influence more control over agencies through unusual political coordination or executive orders asserting broad new powers.
For now, he’s generally succeeded in these moves — although legal questions remain — but he faces a tougher slog against the Federal Reserve, which the Supreme Court has singled out as worthy of special protection and some of his Republican allies would like to see retain its independence.
The president already has dramatic powers to shape the executive branch, including 1,200 appointments that require Senate confirmation and thousands more posts to various boards and commissions he can make unilaterally. On boards with designated Republican and Democratic members, the president typically appoints a new chair from their party and is allowed to fill vacant seats.
But other agencies are designed to be more slow-moving, with board members appointed by different presidents serving long, staggered terms to create more long-term stability.
The Federal Reserve is the gold standard of this approach, with a board of seven members who serve staggered 14-year terms. The president can designate one of the governors as chair for a four-year term, which in recent years has overlapped different presidential administrations.
Trump, who has repeatedly voiced his displeasure with the Federal Reserve’s current policies, has attempted to remove Lisa Cook, a governor appointed by President Joe Biden whose term would not normally end until 2037, based on an allegation of mortgage fraud. Cook has filed a lawsuit saying the removal is illegal and unconstitutional.
Roger Nober, who leads regulatory studies at George Washington University, said that past presidents have sought to gain more control over different agencies at times, but Trump has gone dramatically further in trying to oust board members appointed by his predecessors in what appears to be a test of Supreme Court precedents against that.
“Trying to create the legal question, can I just fire them?” he said. “That’s new.”
The Supreme Court has so far done little to stop Trump’s efforts to take over independent agencies.
The Supreme Court has so far done little to stop Trump’s efforts to take over independent agencies, but it did signal that it consider the Federal Reserve different. In an unsigned May decision on a separate case, the Supreme Court hinted that while it might be willing to give Trump broader powers to fire independent agency members, it views the Fed differently, noting that the agency is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
Susan Corke, executive director of Democracy Defenders Action, which is offering legal support to public servants ousted by the administration, says recent firings represent an “overall troubling pattern” of “replacing nonpartisan, expert civil servants with political loyalists.” She emphasized that fighting these moves in court is important to prevent Trump from permanently shifting the balance of power toward the president.
“Once you hand over those powers, it’s very hard to get it back,” Corke said.
Although there isn’t a definitive list, at least a dozen agencies have been traditionally defined as independent, according to Nober, who previously served as chairman of the Surface Transportation Board, one such entity.
The recent firings have raised questions about whether the legislation governing independent agencies should be updated. Some laws specifically cite inefficiency, neglect of duty and malfeasance in office as grounds for presidential removal, while others simply say officials can be removed “for cause,” leaving the phrase up to interpretation.
But such reforms would be time-consuming and likely impossible under the current political climate in Congress. Congressional changes could also potentially run into the same legal hurdles that fired officials have faced in challenging their terminations in the Supreme Court. Several scholars refer to how Trump has yielded the power of the Oval Office to the unitary executive theory in constitutional law studies, a belief that the commander-in-chief has total authority over the executive branch.
“Having spent 17 years in a private company, the unitary executive is much more in keeping with how a CEO operates than it is with how the government” operates, Nober said of Trump. “It doesn’t shock me that as a business executive, that appeals to him,” he added.
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Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.