Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s most recent calendar, released Friday, shows no record of a conversation with President Donald Trump, even while Trump has said he spoke with Warsh about how to vote at a meeting in September.
It’s the fifth calendar since Warsh took office in May to list no meeting or call with the president, though several Senate Democrats asked him this summer to add any such contacts to his publicly released calendars.
The calendars are one of the few windows into how often a president reaches the official who leads the central bank’s decisions on interest rates, and previous Fed chairs have recorded interactions with presidents there. The Fed is designed to operate independently of the White House, setting rates based on its own best assessment of the economy rather than short-term political pressure.
That independence has long been considered a cornerstone of the central bank’s credibility — and a source of tension with Trump, who wants dramatically lower borrowing costs.
Warsh has said that Trump hasn’t pressured him and that he wouldn’t bend if pressed. A spokesperson for the Fed chair declined to comment Friday but pointed to statements Warsh has made to lawmakers.
“I just don’t want to be in the business of sharing discussions that the president and I have,” the Fed chair told senators at a hearing in July.
Sarah Binder, a George Washington University political scientist who studies the Fed’s relationship with Congress, said Fed chairs’ calendars have long recorded meetings with lawmakers and presidents, so it’s reasonable to expect Warsh’s to log his.
“The bigger issue here, it just seems to me, is this is an increasingly important time for Warsh to ensure that he has as strong a support as he can get from Capitol Hill,” Binder said. Democrats swept Congress in last week’s midterms. Not disclosing meetings or calls with the president “just makes his job all the harder,” she said.
Friday’s release of Warsh’s September calendar appeared to contradict an account by Trump that he had counseled the Fed chair on his vote on monetary policy that month.
“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 told reporters Sept. 16. That same day, Warsh and other Fed officials voted to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point even as Trump called 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,” he said. “No, I said, ‘Do what you want.’” The president added that he wanted the Fed chair “to be independent.”
White House officials have declined to say when that conversation took place, and Warsh has declined to confirm it happened at all.
In August, four Democratic senators asked Warsh to tell them in writing whether he’d spoken with the president since taking office. If he had, they wanted his published calendars revised to show it.
The office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who led the letter, said Friday that he hasn’t 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.”
It wasn’t the first time Trump’s account and the calendar parted ways.
“I’ve only spoken to him one time, briefly,” Trump said in August, describing a conversation a few days earlier with Warsh. The Fed chair’s August calendar lists no call with the president.
Trump’s comments then 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.
Kevin Hassett, Trump’s top economic adviser, didn’t dispute the Journal’s account. “Of course he is” talking with Warsh, Hassett said on Bloomberg Television, adding that Trump and the Fed chair “talk about the economy all the time.”
The calendars do record Warsh’s other contacts with the administration, including regular breakfasts with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with meetings with lawmakers and Wall Street executives. Warsh’s only White House visits listed on the five calendars are his swearing-in and a state dinner Trump hosted in late September for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Warsh’s predecessors kept a different record, according to a Washington Post review of the calendars the Fed has released for past chairs. Jerome H. Powell’s list about a dozen meetings or calls with presidents during his eight years as chair, 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 L. Yellen’s calendars list about five meetings with presidents. Ben Bernanke’s, archived by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, list more than two dozen, including regular White House lunches with President George W. Bush during the 2008 financial crisis.
At a Senate Banking Committee hearing in July, Van Hollen pressed Warsh unsuccessfully on whether he had spoken with Trump. Asked at the hearing whether he would follow his predecessor in releasing his schedule and conversations with the president, Warsh said: “I don’t know what the past practice was. I will be in full compliance with the law.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) asked whether there was anything wrong with Warsh returning the president’s calls. “I certainly don’t feel uncomfortable receiving a call from the chairman of this committee or the president of the United States,” Warsh said.
Van Hollen’s letter in August with Sens. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) argued that Powell’s calendars “show calls with President Trump that appear unscheduled, suggesting the calendars are comprehensive records of their discussions.”
The Fed’s webpages for its chairs’ calendars now carry a sentence that wasn’t there over the summer: “Board member calendars reflect scheduled meetings and calls,” which could mean unscheduled meetings and calls go unrecorded. An archived copy of Powell’s page from July doesn’t include that line. Powell’s and Yellen’s pages say they were last updated Aug. 24, five days after the senators’ letter was sent. The Washington Examiner first reported that the sentence was new.
Thomas Drechsel, a Johns Hopkins University economist, has used Fed calendars and presidential diaries to count more than 800 contacts between presidents and Fed officials from 1933 to 2016.
Drechsel said he had only glanced at Warsh’s calendars but noticed they showed no contact with Trump. He said that 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.”
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