Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could be fired by President Donald Trump as part of a purge she said could disrupt U.S. markets.
The Massachusetts Democrat said the expansive authority Trump has claimed to oust officials at independent agencies means “nobody is safe, not even the chairman of the Federal Reserve.”
“If he can just mow through every civil servant, if he can just mow through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it’s a form of lawlessness and all the power belongs to the king,” Warren said in an interview March 26 with Bloomberg Television. She contends the president’s actions are illegal.
Warren opposed Powell’s reappointment by President Joe Biden because of the Fed chair’s support for reducing financial regulations. But she said she stands behind the independence of the Fed as well as agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and others, including inspectors general, who Trump has targeted despite laws intended to protect their independence.
Warren also criticized large-scale dismissal of federal workers by Elon Musk and Trump as “lawlessness.”
She also cautioned that pulling back on regulations that protect investors risks weakening the appeal of U.S. capital markets and ultimately the country’s economy.
“The reason our stock market is so valuable is in part because it has level, transparent rules that are strictly enforced,” she said. She castigated Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for voting for looser regulations ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, and suggested he didn’t learn his lesson about the crisis and the taxpayer bailouts that followed it.
“He had the chance to have 20-20 hindsight,” she said. “He has 20-zero hindsight.”
Warren, a leading progressive voice in her party, also broke with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to drop a procedural blockade against a Republican spending package that averted a government shutdown earlier this month.
Many Democrats had sought to use the moment to limit Musk’s large-scale firings of federal workers and contract cancellations.
“I think there’s a moment when you stand and fight,” she said. “We cannot avoid this fight, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk, truly they want to take this country over for just a handful of people and they want even more wealth and power to go to them while everybody else has to pay for it.”
