Murkowski splits with GOP over Trump Fed nominee

The terrible appearance of having a political employee of President Trump also serve as an “independent” official setting monetary policy bothered Sen. Lisa Murkowski enough that she was the only GOP senator to oppose the confirmation of Stephen Miran as a Federal Reserve governor.

Miran is only taking an unpaid leave of absence from his White House job, which Murkowski found unacceptable.

“We want it, need it, to be that independent board, and so anything that would compromise even the perception of independence, I was looking at very carefully,” Murkowski said Monday, quoted by the New York Times.

She said the “cleanest” option would have been for Miran to resign from his post at the White House. He did not do that.

The Wall Street Journal said Miran “will be the first executive-branch official to sit on the central bank’s board since a landmark overhaul of the Fed’s governance in 1935.”

The vote was 48-47 to put him on the Fed, with Sen. Dan Sullivan again splitting with Murkowski and backing Trump.

Trump has attacked the independence of the Fed.

“Since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Miran has served as the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he helped to produce research to advance and defend the president’s agenda, including his punishing global tariffs. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Miran believes those duties have not caused inflation, and he has shared the president’s criticism of the Fed, The New York Times reported.

“Even Mr. Miran previously endorsed a ban on what he described last year as the “revolving door between the executive branch and the Fed.”

The Journal reported that “former economic policymakers from both parties and Fed veterans have said Miran’s dual-hatted arrangement could chip away at the public’s confidence that the central bank operates free of direct influence from the executive branch.”