He is technically adhering to Congress’s rules for the Federal Reserve, regardless of whether his motives are pure.

W ell, what we anticipated in a Friday evening post came to pass last night: President Trump has fired — or at least is attempting to fire — Lisa Cook, a governor and voting member of the Federal Reserve Board, appointed during the Biden administration.

There is garment-rending, and not without cause. I share the concerns that the president is making a move on the Fed and that his intention is to monetize our astronomical national debt. (Historically, presidents tend to pressure the Fed to keep interest rates low, even when inflationary conditions indicate that they should be higher.) This would weaken the dollar, penalize savers, and risk higher inflation that would penalize everyone.

Nevertheless, this is not as imperious or radical a presidential action as is intimated by the press. That is because Trump purports to be firing Cook for cause.

As I explained on Friday, Congress created the Federal Reserve as a so-called independent government agency — i.e., an entity that is not located in or controlled by any single branch of the government. Under the Fed’s statutory framework, the president may only remove a Fed board member for cause.

Now, as we have discussed extensively since the second Trump term began in January (see, e.g., here and here), the president has taken aim at independent agencies. His critics contend (again, not without cause) that this is because Trump is imperious, rejects limitations on his authority, and seeks to amass power. Yet, as many Trump supporters point out (and have for years before Trump came along), the concept of independent agencies offends the Constitution’s separation of powers principles, in which no entity is permitted to exercise a combination of executive and legislative powers, as the Fed does.

Our system vests all executive power in the president, and therefore an agency that wields executive power is wielding the president’s power. While the Constitution requires Senate confirmation before a superior federal officer is permitted to assume an office that exercises executive power, the Constitution authorizes the president to fire such people at will. Ergo, to the extent that Congress attempts to impose statutory limitations on the president’s authority to remove such officials — for example, by requiring that the president have just cause for removal — such statutes are arguably unconstitutional.

This is why the Trump administration has been trying to provoke a controversy that would require the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which endorsed the concept of independent agencies (in that case, it was the Federal Trade Commission) and upheld congressional restrictions on the president’s removal authority. The president has fired a number of agency heads who have duly challenged their removal in lawsuits that have begun to reach the Supreme Court.

Still, the administration has so far gone about this project with an important caveat: It has excluded the Fed.

To my mind, this is not a principled legal distinction. The separation-of-powers objection the administration has made — so far, successfully — against other agencies is equally applicable to the Fed. What the administration is making is an unprincipled political distinction (while trying to gussy it up as law-driven): It knows that Fed independence is popular and that, if it appeared that the president was taking over the Fed (by supplanting existing board members with his own loyalists), this would roil the financial markets. Consequently, in the sundry legal cases, the Justice Department has argued that the Fed is different, and that even if the Court ultimately overrules Humphrey’s Executor, the central bank can constitutionally persist with its independent status and “for cause” removal restrictions.

I recounted back in May that a majority of the Court appears poised to accept the administration’s contentions about executive power and insulation of the Fed. In Trump v. Wilcox, a case involving Trump’s firings of members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Court’s majority drew the following distinction about the Fed while allowing the “at will” firings to proceed: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

For what little it’s worth, I believe that Justice Elena Kagan was right in her dissent that if the Fed is to be preserved, that would call for upholding Humphrey’s — which, as a progressive, she prefers because logically it would require upholding the rest of the administrative state agencies against Trump’s campaign to rein in and control them. Yet, Justice Kagan is in the dissent; it appears the majority — probably in the coming term — will gut or reverse Humphrey’s and affirm the president’s power to fire agency heads but will carve out the Fed as a historical exception that gets to remain independent of executive control.

Or, at least, that’s what the Court will do unless our mercurial president blows up the arrangement by rashly firing a Fed member without cause.

Hence, it is critical to watch what Trump is doing as opposed to the media-Democratic complex’s rationalization of why he is doing it. Trump critics say he is finally taking over the Fed so he can lower interest rates by fiat. But he’s not. There is no doubt that he desires de facto control of the board so he can force rates lower; but, just as he has not fired Fed Chairman Jerome Powell despite all the saber-rattling, he is also not firing Lisa Cox at will. He insists that he is firing her for cause — namely, her private conduct that he frames as mortgage fraud.

There are many reasons to be skeptical about this. As I detailed on Friday, Bill Pulte, the loyalist whom Trump has installed as head of the Federal Housing Administration, evidently to scrutinize the home-loan histories of Trump nemeses, claims that Cook has committed mortgage fraud. (The allegation, which Pulte offers documents to support, is that Cox has misrepresented at least one rental property as a primary residence in order to get a better interest rate.) Pulte could be right about that. It is notable, however, that although he referred Cook to the Justice Department for a possible bank fraud prosecution, the Trump loyalists who run the DOJ have not charged her — just as they haven’t, to this point, charged New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff of California, two other Democratic thorns in Trump’s side who have also been referred to the DOJ by Pulte on similar mortgage fraud theories.

Of course, government officials have positions of public trust and should be held to high standards; that is, it should not be necessary to convict them of crimes in order to establish their unfitness for office. That said, no one has yet proved that Cook violated the law, even though Trump is pronouncing her guilty. (His letter, issued last night, asserts: “There is sufficient reason to believe you may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements” and engaged in “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct.”) Even if the president is right about that, however, there remain the questions I posited on Friday:

Would private misconduct — which is what Cook’s mortgage documents involve — constitute cause? Does cause need to be misconduct in executing the duties of the office? Could cause be established by private conduct that compromises a governor’s capacity to carry out her duties?

Cook and her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, are vowing to fight her termination in the courts. The president’s action last night was significant and controversial, but we are only in the early innings. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. Maybe Trump is right, or maybe he is being unfair to Cook. Either way, he has not fired her at will. He is claiming to fire her for cause. That means he is adhering to Congress’s rules for the Federal Reserve, regardless of whether his motives are pure.