U.S. Vice President JD Vance speaks in front of a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in a hangar as he addresses troops from the USAF 501 combat support wing during a visit to RAF Fairford airbase, Fairford, Britain, August 13, 2025. REUTERS/Toby Melville
Vice President JD Vance just said the "quiet part out loud" when it comes to President Donald Trump's attack on the Federal Reserve.
Trump has repeatedly attacked the Fed, including unprecedented moves such as firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud and urging Chair Jerome Powell to resign for refusing to cut interest rates.
On Friday, Steve Benen, a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show" and editor of MaddowBlog, flagged recent remarks from Trump's No. 2 about Cook's ouster, which Benen found revealing.
“The question is: Do we want a person who makes a mistake like that to be a person who sits on the Federal Reserve Board, which makes important monetary policy for the entire country?” Vance said.
Vance later shared the White House's viewpoint on the Fed.
"Isn’t it a little preposterous to say that the president of the United States — the elected president of the United States, working of course in concert with Congress — doesn’t have the ability to make these determinations? I don’t think that we allow bureaucrats to sit from on high and make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates without any input from the people that were elected to serve the American people."
Benen noted it should be "obvious" why the Fed is largely independent and "makes its own decisions about interest rates: It’s because politicians are really bad at it."
"The whole point of removing partisan, electoral and political considerations from the process is because, in some instances, it’s necessary to deliberately slow economic growth in order to address broader concerns about problems such as inflation. But because elected officials, who fear a backlash from voters, are always going to be reluctant to make the economy worse on purpose, our system puts these decisions in the hands of Senate-confirmed professionals at the Fed," he wrote.
Benen concluded that Trump either wants to "bully them into submission or replace them with knee-jerk loyalists" so he can boost economic growth regardless of the long-term repercussions.