By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A Republican U.S. senator on the finance committee on Sunday stressed the importance of an independent Federal Reserve, diverging from Vice President JD Vance’s statement that the president and elected officials should have a say in monetary policy.
U.S. Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the U.S. central bank should set interest rates while the president and Congress had different roles to play.
“All of us have a role in it. We just have a different role. Federal Reserve is at its best when it’s independent, but they’re not independent of the entire American people,” Lankford said. “Let’s each do our job on that.”
President Donald Trump has blasted the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for months for not lowering interest rates.
Last week he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed. He accused her of mortgage fraud, but Cook and her supporters said the claim was a pretext to remove her so he could appoint an ally to the central bank who would promote his policy wishes.
Opponents have criticized Trump’s firing of Cook and his removal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics director a month ago as an effort by the Republican president to control historically independent institutions. Cook is suing to block her firing.
Vance last week told USA Today it was “preposterous” to suggest a president could not fire a Fed official or help shape monetary policy.
“I feel very strongly that the president of the United States is much better able to make these determinations,” he said.
Asked about those comments, Lankford said he believed the Fed should set interest rates, and the president and members of Congress separately shaped economic policy by setting taxes and tariffs.
Democratic Representative Ro Khanna echoed the need for an independent Federal Reserve in a separate interview with “Meet the Press,” but also called on Cook to release her mortgage documents to ensure transparency.
“She should be transparent so that we see that this is just a political football,” he said.
“But this has nothing to do with the specifics of Lisa Cook. This has to do with Donald Trump following Richard Nixon’s playbook to interfere with the Fed and bully the Fed,” Khanna said, referring to former President Nixon’s pressure on the Fed to hold interest rates down before the 1972 election.
Nixon won that election but resigned two years later because of the Watergate scandal.
Khanna said Trump’s tariff policies were fueling inflation that was complicating the Fed’s moves to lower interest rates.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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