Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook says she will not step down from her role and intends to sue, after U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that he would fire her.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday night, Trump shared a letter he wrote to Cook informing her that he was terminating her role.
“You are hereby removed from your position on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve effective immediately,” the letter reads.
In it, the president claims he had reasonable grounds to believe that Cook made false statements on mortgage agreements, citing two separate documents signed two weeks apart stating that she had two primary residences in two different states.
Lisa Cook, member of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve, attends a Federal Reserve Board open meeting discussing proposed revisions to the board’s supplementary leverage ratio standards at the Federal Reserve Board building in Washington, DC, on June 25, 2025.
Photo by SAUL LOEB / SAUL LOEB / Getty Images
“It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second. It is impossible that you intended to honour both,” the letter says.
Calls for Cook, 61, to resign over mortgage fraud allegations began last week, after a letter from housing finance regulator Bill Pulte was made public.
Here is the Criminal Referral Letter on Lisa Cook, the current Fed Governor. pic.twitter.com/aG0LGnokei
— Pulte (@pulte) August 20, 2025
Cook said that she will continue in her role and that the president had no authority to fire her.
“I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press. A lawyer for Cook later said that she would be suing to challenge Trump’s action.
“His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Cook’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said.
“We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action,” he added.
Global markets slumped following Trump’s announcement, as interest rates set by the U.S. central bank inform fiscal policy in other countries.
At the end of July, Cook, along with other members of the committee charged with setting U.S. interest rates, voted to hold them steady between 4.25 and 4.5 per cent, where they have been since December.
Cook was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022 and is not Trump’s only target. The president has also expressed a desire to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, with whom he had a public disagreement over ongoing renovations at the central bank’s Washington, D.C. headquarters in July.
Powell called the president out for exaggerating the costs of the construction.
Trump told reporters that building costs had gone up by almost half a billion dollars, from US$2.7 billion to $3.1 billion, leading Powell to shake his head in disapproval before saying, “I am not aware of that.”
When Cook took office, she became the first Black woman to serve as a Fed Governor in the institution’s over century-long history. She initially filled an unexpired term and was reappointed the following year. Her appointment runs through January 2038.
She has received degrees from Oxford University, Spelman College and the University of California, Berkeley. Some of her most well-known research has focused on the impact of racial violence on African-American innovation and, consequently, wider economic growth.
— With files from The Associated Press