Lisa Cook’s path to Fed governor prepared her for a fight in the spotlight

At Spelman College in Atlanta, Lisa Cook is the “personification of excellence”, said Darlene Smith-Garner, a graduate in 2023 of the historically Black Women’s College, where Cook also studied.

“We see it as one of our older old people, a model,” said Smith-Garner. “To arrive where she is, she had to overcome a lot and fight. And that’s what she will do now, as Spelman’s wife. And not just a fight not for her work, but a fight for what is good.”

Cook’s latest fight is with Donald Trump to keep his position on the Council of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

Trump sent a letter on Monday to Cook saying that he was dismissing her after the federal director of the housing financing agency, Bill Pulte, accused her of falsifying bank files to obtain favorable mortgage conditions before she was raised to her post.

Cook, 61 years old.

Cook’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said she was planning to put legal action contesting the basis of her dismissal. A White House spokesman said in a statement that Trump “had exercised his legitimate power to remove it.”

The fighting was the academic and professional career brand of Cook, underlined by it becoming the first black woman to serve as governor of the Federal Reserve. She was confirmed after vice-president Kamala Harris published a vote in the Senate linked in 2022. The governors of the Federal Reserve should fill out 14-year-old mandates.

The cook’s history informed his scholarship

Cook is from Milledgeville, in Georgia, a picturesque city at around 98 miles south-east of Atlanta which served as the capital of the State from 1804 to 1868. After the civil war, the capital moved to Atlanta, which led to the economic fall of the city of Cook. Generations later, she and her sister were among the first black students to integrate their local schools; In 2020, Cook told NPR that she always had a “scar where the hair does not grow in my eyebrow and a scar on my leg of having been beaten during this period, during the period of desegregation.”

Cook has greatly studied the way in which racial discrimination, including the segregation and laws of Jim Crow, affected the American economy as a whole. In a New York Times article in 2020, she wrote that discrimination “inflicts an amazing cost on the entire economy”. In a university article, she concludes that “domestic terrorism” and violence against blacks have represented more than 1,100 missing patents, which implies “that ethnic and political conflicts can affect the level, management and quality of invention and economic growth over time”.

According to the Associated Press, his work has expanded beyond the United States, the roles advise Nigerian and Rwandan governments on banking reform and economic development, according to the Associated Press.

After studying in Spelman, the University of Oxford and the University of California in Berkeley, where she obtained a doctorate. In economics, Cook was a auxiliary professor at Harvard University. She has taught economics and economic policy for years at Michigan State University. Under President Barack Obama, Cook sat on the Council of White House economic advisers.

As the first and only black woman on the board of directors of the federal reserve, Cook is also part of a very small cohort of black women with a doctorate in economics. According to an annual report, 1.8% of all economic diplomas went to black women in 2024, and although the figure has increased over the past decade, 6.7% of doctoral students have been awarded to black women, according to an annual report by the American Economic Association.

It has faced a republican resistance in the past

Despite Cook’s references, the Senate Republicans pushed his work during his confirmation audience, including JD Vance, then a republican senator from Ohio, who said at the time that an accent on diversity “could distract our ability to focus on much more important things”. Peter Navarro, long -standing economic advisor for Trump, said in 2022 that Cook was “more qualified to train an NFL team” than to join the Fed.

After the narrow vote, then-sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, pointed out that no republican voted to confirm it.

“It’s been 109 years and seven people in the federal reserve at some point, and not an African-American woman,” he told HuffPost after confirmation. “They should be ashamed.”

How does Cook integrate into the Fed?

In the federal reserve, Cook has sat on the committee of consumer and community affairs, which implements federal laws “intended to protect and inform consumers of credits and other financial service transactions”. It also sits on the financial stability committee, as well as the smaller regional and community banks.

The president of the New York Fed, John Williams, told CNBC on Wednesday that Cook had “always brought integrity and a commitment to the mission of the federal reserve. She is a very estimated and highly respected economist”.

Cook is considered a more dominant voter within the Federal Committee of the Free Rate Setting Market and voted in accordance with the President of the Fed, Jerome Powell, to keep the interest rates pending. She has a permanent vote on such policies until the end of her 14 -year term. If it is deleted, this would open the way to Trump candidates to hold a majority on the Fed Board of Directors, against which the Economic Policy Institute warned on Tuesday in a statement.

The future of Cook and the independence of the Fed are under control

“The presidential capture of the Fed would point out to the decision -makers of the economy that interest rates will no longer be set on the basis of solid data or economic conditions, but rather on the president’s whims,” ​​said the group.

Fed members published a statement on Monday, without mentioning Trump, who stressed that the Federal Reserve Act said that governors can only be withdrawn by the president “for good reason”.

The law professor of the University of Columbia, Lev Menand, told the New York Times that examples of “cause” include acts of misconduct carried out within the framework of his position at the Fed, such as accepting a bridge pot or another form of corruption. Cook was not charged with a crime, and the bank documents in question arise before the start of his mandate, according to the Times.

Three years after his mandate, Cook’s future is again to be discussed. It is one of the many senior officials to become targets from the Trump administration. Pulte made similar allegations of financial fraud concerning the prosecutor general of New York Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Who both investigated Trump during the Biden administration.

Trump said on Monday that he rightly called Cook’s dismissal because “she seems to have had an offense, and she cannot have an offense, in particular this offense, because it is in charge, if you think about it, mortgages. And we need 100% people and it doesn’t seem. ”

The leader of the minority of the room, Hakeem Jeffries, Dn.y., said in a statement that the attempt to withdraw Cook was in progress “without the lamb of credible evidence”.

The Congressional Black Caucus described the campaign against Cook as an “illegal attack against the integrity and independence of the federal reserve”.

Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, the best democrat of the banking committee, who supported Cook on Monday during the appointment process, said this decision was an “authoritarian takeover”.

Cheryl W. Turner, international president of Delta Sigma Theta, the historically black sorority of Cook, condemned the attempt to avoid it, the warning would create “serious implications for families and communities” while undergoing the independence of the Fed.

“As a female organization – and champion of justice, scholarships, services and economic development for 112 years – Delta Sigma Theta is unequivocally opposed to any measure that silences black women, whose voices and leadership remain essential to the progression of our nation,” she told NBC News.

As for Cook herself, in a statement last week, she said that she intended to answer questions about her financial history, but added that she had “no intention of being intimidated to move my position because of certain questions raised in a tweet”.