One would think that being on the Federal Reserve board might require one’s full attention, what with being responsible for setting U.S. monetary policy and such. But Stephen Miran, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill an empty spot on the board, decided he doesn’t have to quit his day job.
Miran is currently the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is housed in the Executive Office of the President. In that role, his job is to push for Trump’s cartoonishly ineffective and catastrophic economic policies, which these days is mostly just turning a lever labeled “tariffs” up to 11 and back down to zero in rapid succession.
In other words, it’s not a neutral, nonpartisan position, and it isn’t one that seems terribly compatible with being on the Federal Reserve board, where decisions are theoretically supposed to be made independent of the president’s personal desires.
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But never fear—Miran’s got that part sorted. He won’t step down from the council, but he will take unpaid leave. Oh well then, that’s just fine.
Okay wait, it is not fine. Sure, this administration has so few people willing to join it that Trump has to saddle lightweights like Secretary of State Marco Rubio with three or four different jobs on any given day, but stuffing the hapless Rubio into multiple Cabinet gigs isn’t the same as installing your partisan chief economist on the board for the nation’s central bank.
Miran, for his part, is playing very dumb about the whole thing.
I have been advised by counsel that the legal approach is to take an unpaid leave of absence from the Council of Economic Advisers, cease my CEA activities, and if counsel advises me otherwise, I will follow the law and follow counsel’s advice.
Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey was rightly confused by this.
“I guess I just wanted to ask you, why did counsel advise you in that way? You have every right to say, ‘No, I’m going to resign,’” Kim said.
Miran told Kim he didn’t have the legal expertise to ignore his counsel. Buddy, you are the Senate-confirmed chair of the president’s hand-picked group of economists and you are too wussy to decide for yourself if you can quit your job?
Or, as Sen. Kim put it: “You can determine your own career. You know that, right?”
In part, Miran seems motivated by the fact that his initial Federal Reserve job would only last for four months, as he would be finishing out the remainder of Adriana Kugler’s 14-year term. He would need to be confirmed again for a full term if he got the nod for that down the line. But neither the CEA nor the Federal Reserve is supposed to be treated like some corporate management job trainee program for Miran to rotate through.
Miran may be playing dumb for the cameras, but he thoroughly understands the assignment, which is to push Trump’s interests. He’s not going to be an independent, sober-minded custodian of the country’s financial systems. He’s going to be a partisan spewing pro-Trump dreck, including pretending that tariffs aren’t hurting consumers or businesses. Perhaps he will also share his really racist thoughts about Trump’s abysmal job numbers, which basically boil down to “foreigners took all your jobs”
Trump has attempted to shove out the actually competent, confirmed, and qualified Lisa Cook, who wasn’t treating her job as a governor of the country’s central bank as a side hustle. But Cook was never going to be someone who would let Trump dictate the country’s economic policy based on his whims and ability to line his pockets and the pockets of his friends. it’s clear that Miran will display no such spine.
