Federal Reserve News: Warsh Calendar Has No Trump Talks
Federal Reserve news turned on the question of the central bank’s independence on Monday, when a newly released calendar showed no record of a conversation between President Donald Trump and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh — even though Trump has said he spoke with Warsh about how to vote at a meeting in September. The September calendar, released by the Federal Reserve on Friday, is the fifth monthly calendar since Warsh took office in May that lists no meeting or call with the president, reopening a months-long dispute over how much contact the White House has with the official who leads the central bank’s decisions on interest rates.
The calendars are one of the few public windows into how often a president reaches the official who sets the cost of borrowing for the world’s largest economy. The Federal Reserve is designed to operate independently of the White House, setting rates based on its own assessment of the economy rather than on short-term political pressure, and that independence has been a source of tension with Trump, who has pressed for dramatically lower borrowing costs. The gap between what Trump says happened and what the official record shows has now become the story itself, arriving as the Fed’s next decision approaches in December.
What makes the release difficult to dismiss is that it is not an isolated omission. Five consecutive monthly calendars now show no contact between the two men, even as reporting has described repeated phone calls, even as the president himself has described a conversation about a vote, and even as several Senate Democrats spent the summer formally asking Warsh to correct the record. The Fed has not said the conversations did not happen, and neither side will say whether the calendar or the president’s account is the incomplete one.
The September Calendar and the Missing Call
The conflict comes from a single day in September. On September 16, Trump told reporters he had spoken with Warsh before the Federal Reserve’s meeting that day and had told the chair he might as well vote with the rest of the board. “I talked to Kevin, and I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board ’cause it’s not gonna matter” — because he didn’t have the votes anyway, Trump said. That same day, Warsh and the other Fed officials voted to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, even as Trump was calling for rates to be lowered.
A reporter asked when Trump had talked to Warsh and whether he had tried to change the Fed chair’s mind. “No, I didn’t convince him,” the president said. “No, I said, ‘Do what you want.'” He added that he wanted the Fed chair “to be independent.” The remarks were striking: a president describing a private conversation with the central bank chief about a vote that was about to take place, and then insisting he had not tried to influence the outcome. The calendar released on Friday appears to contradict the account, showing no meeting and no call with Trump in September.
White House officials have declined to say when that conversation took place, and Warsh has declined to confirm it happened at all. A spokesperson for the Fed chair declined to comment on Friday, pointing instead to statements Warsh has made to lawmakers. The calendars do record Warsh’s other contacts with the administration, which makes the absence more conspicuous. They list regular breakfasts with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with meetings with lawmakers and Wall Street executives. The Federal Reserve has confirmed it will not publicly disclose communications between Warsh and Trump unless they are formally scheduled calls or meetings, so informal or unscheduled contact goes unrecorded in public, even when the president himself describes it to reporters.
A Pattern of Unrecorded Contact
It was not the first time Trump’s account and the calendar parted ways. In August, Trump said he had spoken with Warsh only once, briefly, describing a conversation a few days earlier. The Fed chair’s August calendar lists no call with the president. Trump’s comments came days after the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the conversations, that Trump had phoned Warsh many times since he took over the Fed, sometimes several times within a few days. Bloomberg reported the calls as well, describing Trump seeking Warsh’s views on the economic impact of the war in Iran and on artificial intelligence. Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, did not dispute the account, saying the two men “talk about the economy all the time.” Trump later pushed back on the scale of the contact, saying he and Warsh had spoken “one time, briefly, a few days ago,” a version that sat uneasily with the Journal’s account of repeated calls and with Hassett’s confirmation that the two men speak regularly.
The dispute reached Congress in the summer. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on July 15, Warsh was pressed on the question and would not give a direct answer. “I just don’t want to be in the business of sharing discussions that the president and I have,” the Fed chair told senators. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, asked whether Warsh had spoken with the president, and Warsh answered that he did not have anything for him on the subject. Warsh has said Trump has not pressured him and would not bend if pressed, telling senators the president never asked him to do anything inappropriate and that if he did, he would not do it.
In August, four Democratic senators wrote to Warsh asking him to tell them in writing whether he had spoken with the president since taking office, and to revise his published calendars to show it if he had. The letter, led by Van Hollen and signed by Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, argued that the calendars of Warsh’s predecessor showed calls with Trump that appeared unscheduled, suggesting the calendars were comprehensive records of the discussions. Van Hollen’s office said on Friday that he has not received a response. “It’s clear neither Warsh nor Trump give a damn about transparency to the American people,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “Under a Democratic majority in Congress, we will continue pushing for that much-needed transparency.”
Fed Rate Decision: How Past Chairs Kept Their Calendars
Warsh’s predecessors kept a different kind of record, according to a Washington Post review of the calendars the Fed has released for past chairs. Jerome Powell, whom Warsh succeeded after eight years as chair, logged about a dozen meetings or calls with presidents during his tenure, eight of them with Trump in 2019 and 2020. Some were five-minute phone calls, including one logged as a “Phone call from President Trump” on March 8, 2019, while Powell was at Stanford University. Janet Yellen’s calendars list about five meetings with presidents, and Ben Bernanke’s list more than two dozen, including regular White House lunches with President George W. Bush during the 2008 financial crisis.
The contrast gives the current dispute its weight. For decades the calendars have functioned as a running public log of contact between the White House and the central bank, and the log has included unscheduled calls as well as formal meetings. If the calendars are meant to be comprehensive, then five months with no entry for the president suggests either that the two men have not spoken at all, which would contradict both the reporting and Trump’s own account, or that the record is no longer comprehensive.
Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies the Fed’s relationship with Congress, said the chairs’ calendars have long recorded meetings with lawmakers and presidents, so it is reasonable to expect Warsh’s to log his. With Democrats having swept Congress in last week’s midterm elections, she said, not disclosing meetings or calls with the president “just makes his job all the harder.”
Thomas Drechsel, a Johns Hopkins University economist who has counted more than 800 contacts between presidents and Fed officials from 1933 to 2016 using Fed calendars and presidential diaries, said Warsh deserves “the benefit of the doubt” but that people should “press him hard” on what conversations are taking place. “It’s important. We should know,” Drechsel said. “I would love to know, and the American public should know.”
The Fed’s webpages for its chairs’ calendars now carry a sentence that was not there over the summer: “Board member calendars reflect scheduled meetings and calls.” The wording could mean unscheduled meetings and calls go unrecorded, which would explain the gap without resolving it. The Washington Examiner first reported that the sentence was new, and the Fed has not explained the change. The wording leaves the public unable to tell which conversations were scheduled and which were not.
When Is the Next Fed Meeting — and Why the Calendar Fight Matters
The calendar dispute is not an abstract argument about record-keeping. It goes to the credibility of the institution that sets interest rates, and it is unfolding as the Fed’s next move draws intense market attention. A Federal Reserve decision is due in December, and the market is pricing in a nearly 80 percent chance of a rate increase, even as Trump continues to call for rates to come down. Inflation data due on Tuesday will shape expectations further, and the central bank’s communications in the weeks ahead will be read closely for any sign of how the chair is weighing the economy against the political pressure around him.
That pressure is not new, but the context has changed. Trump picked Warsh to run the Fed, and Warsh was sworn in as chair in a White House ceremony in May, succeeding Powell after eight years. What is new is that the Democrats who swept both chambers of Congress in last week’s midterm elections will take office in January, and they have already signaled they intend to use their majority to press for transparency. Warsh’s next appearance before the Senate Banking Committee is likely to feature the same questions he declined to answer in July, asked this time by a committee under new leadership.
The stakes for Warsh are straightforward. A Fed chair’s authority rests in large part on the perception that the central bank makes its decisions on the merits of the economy, free of political direction. Every unexplained gap in the public record feeds the opposite perception, whether or not any pressure was actually applied. A chair who will need Congress’s support in the months ahead is making his own job harder by leaving the question open, and the American people should know how often the president speaks with the person who sets their mortgage rates and the cost of borrowing for the businesses they work for.
For now, the facts are these. The September calendar shows no record of the conversation Trump described on September 16. It is the fifth calendar in a row to show no contact with the president. Four senators asked for a written accounting in August and have received no response. None of that proves a conversation was hidden, and none of it proves one never happened. What it proves is that the public record no longer answers a question that used to be easy to answer, and that the people asking it are about to have considerably more power to keep asking.
*Source: The Washington Post*