Fordham Law Professor Jane Manner’s 2021 Columbia Law Review article, “The Three Permissions: Presidential Removal and the Statutory Limits of Agency Independence,” was cited in The New York Times, after President Donald Trump said earlier this week that he wanted to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
More than 30 federal laws say that leaders of executive agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, can only be removed for some combination of “inefficiency, neglect of duty and malfeasance.” Another 20 or so, like the one governing the Fed, allow removal of agency leaders for cause.
The difference may matter. Writing in The Columbia Law Review in 2021, Professor Menand and Jane Manners, now a law professor at Fordham, said that “good cause” included not just “inefficiency, neglect of duty and malfeasance” but a broader category of misdeed that includes “immorality, ineligibility, offenses involving moral turpitude and conviction of a crime.”
That means, they wrote, that “the president’s power to remove Federal Reserve governors is greater than it is over many other independent agency heads.”
Read “The Fate of the Fed May Turn on Two Words: ‘For Cause’” in The New York Times.