From the first day Trump was sworn into office for his second presidential administration, administrative agencies have been under attack. These attacks have been a mixture of the longstanding agendas of far right think tanks who have disdain for the administrative state and big tech’s technological agenda. The legal core of this assault is the theory of the “unitary executive”- the idea that the executive branch is under the direct and personal control of the president rather than filled with a multitude of agencies with varying degrees of discretion and ability to make decisions independently of the White House.

A long standing tension for far right legal theorists has been the place of the Federal Reserve in their legal theories. Economists have their own ad-hoc amateur theory of administrative law- known as “central bank independence”. How could an “independent” Federal Reserve survive the unitary executive theory’s elimination of independent agencies? In Trump V. Wilcox, the Supreme Court hinted at a squaring of this circle by declaring a “unitary executive- except for the Fed” solution. Recently, the Trump administration has raised the stakes by attempting to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. As of this writing, Lisa Cook is still in her position while her case is being appealed to the supreme court.

What are the stakes of a Federal Reserve fully under the control of Donald Trump? While mainstream commentators focus on interest rate policy, the stakes are quite a bit larger. From budgetary policy to credit policy, the potential for abuse is enormous and not well understood. After introducing the state of play, the rest of the talk will focus on the less understood potential mechanisms for abuse and draw larger conclusions for what these mechanisms tell us about the nature of the Federal Reserve.