(Adds further Hassett comments, context)
WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) – White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Friday that President Donald Trump and his team were studying the matter when asked if firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was an option.
“The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett told reporters at the White House in response to a question.
Hassett’s exchange with the press came a day after Trump ramped up a long-simmering feud with the Fed chair, accusing Powell of “playing politics” by not cutting interest rates and asserting he had the power to evict Powell from his job “real fast.”
Hassett appeared to distance himself from his 2021 book, “The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism,” in which he argued that firing Powell during Trump’s first term would have harmed the reputation of the Fed as an objective and independent manager of the nation’s money supply and could have compromised the credibility of the dollar and crashed the stock market.
“I think that at that time, the market was a completely different place. And, you know, I was referring to legal analysis that we had back then. And if there’s new legal analysis that says something different, then we need to rethink our response,” Hassett said.
It was not immediately clear what new legal analysis he was referencing, but a case over whether Trump overstepped his authority in firing two Democrats from federal labor boards now pending at the Supreme Court is being closely watched as a potential precedent for
whether Trump could remove Powell
Powell has said that the law would not allow his removal, that he would not leave if asked to by Trump, and that he intends to serve through the end of his term in May 2026. Powell also said this week he does not think the current case on appeal at the U.S. high court
. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Kanishka Singh in Washington; additional reporting by Ann Saphir in San Francisco, Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Dan Burns and Franklin Paul)
