President Donald Trump has narrowed his list of potential Federal Reserve Chair picks to succeed Jerome Powell.
Trump told CNBC on Tuesday that there are now four people under his consideration: White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, and two more candidates that Trump did not name. He said that he will make a decision “soon.” Powell’s term comes to an end in May 2026.
“Kevin and Kevin, both Kevins, are very good,” Trump said. “The two Kevins are doing well. And I have two other people that are doing well.”
He added that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whom Trump earlier said was “an option” to replace Powell, is not on the list: “I love Scott, but he wants to stay where he is.”
Who Trump ends up picking could determine both the course of the economy for the next four years and the credibility of the Federal Reserve. Already, economists and policymakers have raised concerns that Trump’s attempts to pressure Powell, whom he has dubbed “Mr. Too Late,” to cut short-term interest rates have undermined the institution’s political independence.
Trump has spent months railing against Powell who has thus far resisted that pressure, and openly suggested that he could replace Powell sooner—which he is not allowed to do except for cause—although he has also publicly said he’s “highly unlikely” to fire Powell.
Trump called a Wall Street Journal report last month “typically untruthful” after it claimed that Bessent made the case to Trump to not fire Powell over legal concerns and economic risks. “Nobody had to explain that to me,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A.”
Trump will, however, get a chance to install a fourth Republican on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors—which includes two nominees from his first term as well as Powell, who was appointed by former President Obama in a bipartisan gesture and nominated to be chairman by Trump in 2017—earlier than expected, after Adriana Kugler, a Democrat, announced on Friday that she was stepping down ahead of her term expiring in January. The President told CNBC on Tuesday that the news was a “pleasant surprise” and that his pick to replace Kugler, which will be announced “soon,” may also be his choice to replace Powell.
Here’s what to know about Trump’s potential picks.
Kevin Hassett
Hassett is a top economic adviser to Trump as the director of the National Economic Council. He formerly served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first presidential term as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019.
He returned to the White House in 2020 to assist with Trump’s COVID-19 response, during which time he came under fire for using a “cubic model” to project that pandemic deaths would reach zero by mid-May that year.
Hassett is an ardent supporter of Trump’s economic agenda, including Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” tax cuts, and tariffs. He has also defended Trump’s controversial decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last week after the President baselessly asserted that recent monthly jobs data was “manipulated for political purposes.”
Hassett told CNBC on Monday that “all over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can” and that a “fresh start” is needed to “make sure that that’s not going to happen in the data agencies.”
A doctoral graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, Hassett was formerly a fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution and previously worked at center-right think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
Kevin Warsh
Warsh became the youngest Fed governor in the central bank’s history in 2006 at the age of 35 and served in that position until 2011, acting as the central bank’s primary liaison to Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. He worked as a mergers and acquisitions banker at Morgan Stanley from 1995 to 2002, when he joined the George W. Bush Administration as an economics adviser until being appointed to the Fed.
Warsh has expressed support for lowering interest rates and criticized Powell over his refusal to do so.
“The President’s right to be frustrated with Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve,” Warsh said on Fox News in July. He said at a lecture hosted by the Group of Thirty, an international body of economists and financial leaders, that “the Fed’s current wounds are largely self-inflicted,” and in July told CNBC that the Fed needs “regime change in the conduct of policy” and “a new Treasury-Fed accord, like we did in 1951 after another period where we built up our nation’s debt and we were stuck with a central bank that was working at cross purposes with the Treasury.”
“That’s the state of things now,” he said on CNBC. “So if we have a new accord, then the … Fed chair and the Treasury Secretary can describe to markets plainly and with deliberation, ‘This is our objective for the size of the Fed’s balance sheet.’”
But Warsh has also advocated for higher interest rates in the past, including last year, as well as for free trade, globalization, and the Fed’s political independence, which could clash with Trump’s economic vision.
Warsh is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he serves on the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, which is nonpartisan. He is married to Jane Lauder, whose father, billionaire Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, reportedly pitched the idea of buying Greenland to Trump.
Warsh was reportedly under consideration by Trump for the role of Fed Reserve Chair in 2017. Trump seemed to regret not going with Warsh and ultimately picking Powell at the signing of a phase-one trade agreement with China in January 2020.
“Kevin Warsh. Kevin. Where’s Kevin? I don’t know, Kevin, I could have used you a little bit here. Why weren’t you more forceful when you wanted that job?” Trump said. “I would have been very happy with you.”