Lisa Cook Broke Ground at the Fed, Before Attack by Trump

Years before Lisa Cook became President Trump’s latest target in his effort to exert control over the Federal Reserve, she wrote about her experience as one of a relative handful of Black women in a field long dominated by white men.

“Economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women,” she and a colleague wrote in a New York Times opinion essay in 2019. She added, “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”

Three years later, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. nominated Ms. Cook to the Fed’s powerful Board of Governors. Her confirmation process was a difficult one — she faced repeated questions about her qualifications despite a résumé that included stints at the Treasury Department and the White House as well as extensive academic experience.

She was confirmed, but narrowly: Vice President Kamala Harris broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate after Republicans voted overwhelmingly against her appointment. She was the first — and remains the only — Black woman to serve as a Fed governor.

On Monday Mr. Trump said he was removing Ms. Cook from the job, days after Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, accused her on social media of falsifying bank records and other documents in order to obtain favorable terms on a mortgage before she joined the Fed.

Ms. Cook, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing or convicted of a crime, may have grounds to challenge her dismissal. The president cannot oust a Fed board member without “cause,” which is typically interpreted to mean malfeasance or gross misconduct. In a statement released by the Fed last week, she said she had “no intention of being bullied” and pledged to gather “accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts.”

Since joining the Fed, Ms. Cook — like most of her colleagues — has voted consistently with Jerome H. Powell, its chair, both last year, when the central bank began cutting interest rates, and this year, when it has held them steady. But many outside observers consider Ms. Cook a relative “dove,” economist jargon for someone who generally supports lower interest rates.

In a speech in November, she argued that the Fed should probably continue to lower interest rates, though she said the appropriate pace of cuts would depend on the economic data. But that was before Mr. Trump’s tariffs began threatening to push up prices. In a speech in June, she warned that the recent period of high inflation after the pandemic “could make firms more willing to raise prices and consumers more likely to expect high inflation to persist.”

The daughter of a hospital chaplain and a nursing professor, Ms. Cook grew up in Georgia, where she and her sisters were among the first Black students at the schools they attended. She went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Spelman College, the historically Black institution in Atlanta, and then another at Oxford University, where she was a Marshall scholar.

In a speech last fall, she said she did not initially plan to study economics, but fell in love with the field when she hiked Mount Kilimanjaro alongside a British economist. She received her doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.

Ms. Cook has spoken often about how her experience with racism informed her approach to economics. Perhaps her best-known academic paper showed how lynchings and other violence against Black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reduced the number of patents they filed.

That research had implications far beyond the post-Reconstruction South. Her findings showed that economies will be less innovative and less productive when governments don’t ensure their citizens’ safety.

“Her work showed the role of institutions in allowing people to be able to reach their creative capacity and allowing them to be productive,” said Trevon Logan, an Ohio State University economist and a frequent co-author with her.

Ms. Cook spent most of her academic career at Michigan State University, where she was a professor of economics and international relations when Mr. Biden tapped her for the Fed board. While at Michigan State, she became a prominent voice calling for promoting diversity in the economics field, and helped lead the American Economic Association’s summer program, which aims to prepare students from underrepresented backgrounds for graduate programs in the social sciences.

It was at that summer program in 2019 that Ms. Cook and one of the students, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, came up with the idea of writing an article about the profession’s toxic culture for Black women. A survey of economists published that year found that 62 percent of Black women in the field said they had experienced racial or gender discrimination, or both. One Black woman responded to the survey with a comment that became the headline of their opinion essay: “It was a mistake for me to choose this field.”

In an interview, Ms. Opoku-Agyeman said it was striking that, six years later, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pulte had chosen to target the Fed’s only Black female governor.

“They’re using who they think is most expendable to essentially shape the way that the Fed functions,” she said.

Ms. Opoku-Agyeman is now a doctoral student at Harvard University and the author of a forthcoming book on the economic challenges facing women of color. She said it was notable that the attacks on Ms. Cook focused on her property ownership given that Black Americans were nearly 40 percent less likely than white Americans to own homes.

“It’s also attacking the perception of who builds wealth in this country, and they’re using a prominent Black woman in the economic policy space and essentially making an example out of her,” she said. “They’re trying to paint this woman of color as someone who is unworthy of wealth.”

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