Last week, Adriana Kugler, one of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, announced her resignation. That means that President Donald Trump will have the opportunity to nominate a new member, who will then face the U.S. Senate for confirmation.
The members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors sit on the Federal Open Market Committee, which votes on interest rates. Their terms are 14 years long — longer than three presidential election cycles.
“And that’s intentional because the idea here is that you want a group of people who can try to actually see around the corners and have a long-term perspective,” said Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was a member of the Board of Governors from 2010-2014. “The idea is you would, you will have a longer perspective, because you are not going to necessarily be replaced with the political cycle.”
In reality, very few Fed Governors actually serve a full fourteen years. When a Governor steps down early, the president nominates somebody new to fill the remainder of that fourteen years and the Senate has a chance to confirm or deny.
The seat vacated by Adriana Kugler was set to expire this January anyway, but it is President Trump’s first opportunity during his second term to name someone for the board.
“So, this is a crack, this is an opening for Trump to begin to build that majority on, if we want to think in those terms,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of Political Science at George Washington University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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