WASHINGTON – The Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday voted 13 to 11 to advance Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Federal Reserve chairman despite Democrats’ concerns that he would not be independent from President Donald Trump.
The banking committee’s vote fell along party lines, with all 13 Republicans voting in favor of the nomination and all 11 Democrats voting against it. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a press release that it was the first time a vote on a Fed chair nominee was entirely partisan.
Democrats warned that installing Warsh as Fed chair would mean Trump exerting control over the central bank, with consequences for the economy.
The committee’s decision marked a win for Trump, who announced in January that he selected Warsh to lead the Fed. The nomination came amid a months-long public feud between the president and the current Fed Chair Jerome Powell over interest rates that thrust the central bank into political controversy. Trump also attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor.
“Donald Trump by pursuing this criminal prosecution against the Fed chair and also against a Fed governor, Lisa Cook, basically unsheathed a sword and holds it over everyone at the Fed,” Warren told reporters before the vote. “He has made clear that he doesn't care what term you have, what's been passed by Congress, what the law is. He is willing to go after people criminally, even when they're in office, if they make decisions that he doesn't like.”
Warsh’s nomination was blocked for weeks by Senator Thom Tillis, R-NC, who said he would not vote to advance Warsh until the Justice Department dropped its criminal investigation into Powell regarding a costly renovation project of the central bank’s headquarters. The department closed its probe last week, and Tillis on Wednesday voted to move Warsh’s nomination forward.
But Warren, along with other Senate Democrats, expressed concern that the probe could be reopened and voted against Trump’s pick. Tillis spoke to reporters after the vote and criticized Warren’s actions as “political theater.”
“I'm happy with the way the DOJ comported themselves over the week, and got me to a point where I'm comfortable with (voting for Warsh),” he said. “She didn't get the assurances that I did, and I'm confident that we'll move forward in good faith, and they will deliver on their commitment.”
If the full Senate votes to confirm Warsh, he would replace Powell when his term expires on May 15 and become the 17th chairman of the Federal Reserve.
But Senate Democrats have criticized Warsh’s nomination, citing concerns in a confirmation hearing last week that he would serve as Trump’s “sock puppet.”
At the hearing, Warsh declined to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and dodged questions about whether he thought the Trump administration’s probe into Powell threatened the independence of monetary policy.
Democrats have interpreted his refusal to answer questions as a sign of his loyalty to Trump and worried that Warsh could compromise the central bank’s independence.
But Warsh explained his silence in another way. “We need to keep politics out of monetary policy and keep monetary policy out of politics,” he said.
The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913 to serve as the central bank of the United States with the purpose of promoting maximum employment and stable prices. It does not receive funding from Congress and is considered an independent agency within the government.
“It's become the consensus view that independence of the central bank is important, that it will generally lead to better outcomes,” said Seth Carpenter, global chief economist at Morgan Stanley and former deputy director at the Federal Reserve Board. “If you have a central bank that is subject to short-term political wins, then you could get into a situation where policy decisions are made to try to curry favor with voters to get a certain economic outcome for a political outcome, and that could be bad.”
He pointed to former Fed Chair Arthur Burns as a cautionary tale. Burns served as head of the central bank in the 1970s and is remembered for allowing inflation to run rampant after bending to political pressure from President Richard Nixon.
Warsh previously positioned himself as a reformer intent on changing the central bank, including shrinking its balance sheet and holding fewer press conferences to communicate policy decisions.
But Robert Hetzel, a Federal Reserve historian and former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said he believes Warsh would be unlikely to make major changes at the central bank.
He anticipated that Warsh would have to strike a balance between being a reformer and working closely to convince members of the Federal Open Market Committee to go along with his plans.
“What remains to be seen is just how pragmatic he is, just how willing he is to disappoint Trump, and realistically go after the kinds of reforms he's suggested publicly,” Hetzel said.
But he stressed that he expected Warsh to do a good job and resist the flak he receives from politicians.
However, Democrats predicted Trump would pressure Warsh to make the economy seem stronger before the mid-term elections in November.
“The Fed is supposed to be there as a protector for our economy overall and insulate monetary policy from politics, but that's not what Donald Trump wants,” Warren told reporters. “What Donald Trump wants is the Fed to be under his complete control, and he wants it right now, because he's in real trouble on this economy, prices are up, jobs are stagnant, and the economy is looking shaky, and voters know that.”
Erika Tulfo is a reporter covering business and financial policy for Medill News Service.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.