Breitbart Business Digest: When Congress Wrote the Fed Rules, Courts Weren't Invited

The Clause That Vanished—and the Senators Who Found It

When President Donald Trump moved to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook this week, he touched off an immediate debate about what the law means when it says a Fed governor can be removed only “for cause.”

But what if the rule that the president can remove a Federal Reserve official only “for cause” simply disappeared?

That’s exactly what happened in 1933 . In the legislative blitz to stabilize a collapsing banking system, Congress quietly dropped the “for cause” language that had anchored the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. For nearly two years, on paper, the Washington board’s appointive members served at the President’s pleasure. Even stranger: hardly anyone noticed.

The discovery came in 1935, during hearings on the next