Trump tries again to remove Lisa Cook. Most others he targeted were out in a month.

What happened

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook’s lawyers, Abbe Lowell and Norman Eisen, sent the White House a detailed rebuttal on 27 August to its 5 August notice that the President was considering removing her over alleged false statements on mortgage agreements.

Lisa Cook is a governor of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank. The White House letter of 5 August was signed by deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino. It gave her three weeks to answer claims that she made false statements on mortgage agreements. She denies them.

Her lawyers said an honest mistake is not fraud. They said the process is an attempt to bend the Federal Reserve to the President’s will.

This is the second attempt. In August 2025 the President wrote to Cook removing her at once. It was the first move against a Federal Reserve governor since the Fed was founded in 1913. She sued. A judge blocked the removal on 9 September 2025 and the appeals court refused to lift that order. The Supreme Court then left her in her job while it heard the case.

On 29 June 2026 the Supreme Court gave a split answer. In a case brought by Rebecca Slaughter, a former member of the Federal Trade Commission, it overturned a 1935 ruling known as Humphrey’s Executor. It said presidents may fire the heads of independent agencies at will. The same logic covers the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

By 5 to 4, the Court kept Cook in her job. The law says she can be removed only for a good reason, called cause. The Chief Justice wrote that removing her without notice or a hearing would turn that into firing at will. A footnote said the President could try again with proper notice. The 5 August letter is that second try.

Sources: Al Jazeera (2, 3, 4)

The Pattern

We found four removals like this since January 2025. Each time the President moved to remove a member of a federal board whom the law protects from being fired without good reason, and the member went to court. Officials removed on the same day from the same board count as one. For each we checked whether the person was still in office, or back by court order, 30 days after the President’s move.

The Read

History says officials the White House goes after usually lose their jobs, at least for a while. Three of the four board members it moved against in 2025 were out of office a month later. Courts took five weeks to four months to restore them, and the Supreme Court then sided with the President. Cook was the one exception, and the Court has now written down why. The Federal Reserve was left out of the June ruling, and removing her without notice or a hearing did not count as a lawful removal.

That is why our estimate that she is still in her job on 30 September opens above 80%, far above one in four. The letter and the three-week window look like a slow process built to survive a future court case. The Fed also has no way to seat a replacement while the question is open. The weak spot is that the June ruling protected the Fed’s procedure and said nothing about Cook herself, or about what happens once she has had notice and a hearing. The record is also short, four cases, all from the last two years.

A removal order in September, with a finding of fact attached, would settle it against her, and history has no case like it yet. For British readers the effect comes through long-term borrowing costs. A fight over a Fed governor raises the extra return investors want for holding long US government bonds, and UK government bonds, called gilts, have followed that all year.