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Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise today to oppose the nomination of Kevin Warsh to be the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system.

I want to put this nomination in some context. Donald Trump's chaos is not working for the average American. Housing is more expensive; healthcare is more expensive; groceries are more expensive; American manufactures' inputs are more expensive; and gas is more expensive due primarily to the President's unwise and unauthorized war with Iran.

That is quite a list of higher prices and economic chaos, and it is no secret President Trump also thinks he should control the actions of the Federal Reserve. He has tried to fire some of its members, threatened others, and even launched a criminal investigation meant to force out Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

The Federal Reserve is tasked with combating inflation and helping maximize employment. This dual mandate helps companies succeed and Americans find work and support their families.

The American people need and deserve a Fed Chair who is committed to this task--whose sole motivation is meeting the Fed's dual mandate and who is dedicated to the Federal Reserve's independence.

But after attempting to oust one Fed Governor, as well as the current Chair, President Trump appears to have found an individual who will operate according to his wishes, not the Fed's dual mandate.

And I am not simply speculating. President Trump explicitly told America he would pick a Fed Chair committed to his preferred monetary policy--``someone who believes in lower interest rates by a lot''--and publicly confirmed Mr. Warsh fit that bill.

The President has made clear he believes the Fed should shed its independence, arguing, ``I'm a smart voice and should be listened to.'' And Mr. Warsh himself testified the Fed should not be fully independent.

Undermining Fed independence is extremely dangerous. The last time a President exerted control over the Fed was President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. The Fed artificially kept rates low--exactly what President Trump wants today--which helped cause, in the case of Nixon, massive stagflation.

Now, President Trump wants total control of the economy by installing his pick to lead the Fed. And based on the President's track record, we should all be very, very wary. Since President Trump returned to the White House 16 months ago, the United States has added only 420,000 new jobs, and that is a huge drop from the 1.5 million jobs the United States added during President Biden's final 12 months in office.

Similarly, workers' real wages grew at a slower pace last year than in 2024, while GDP growth significantly slowed from 2.8 percent to 2.1 percent. Indeed, a greater share of Americans are unemployed now than when President Biden left office.

Zoom out. How did we get here? It becomes clear. The President's tariffs walloped Americans to the tune of $1,000 in new costs per family last year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

Gas prices are up 50 percent since the President began his war on Iran, with diesel prices $2 higher and home heating oil prices also jumping up significantly.

Researchers at Brown University estimate Americans have spent an extra $38 billion on gas and diesel since the war began--that is $290 per household in a little over 2 months. The President's war with Iran pushed inflation to a 3-year high in April with prices for gas, food, clothing, and housing increasing significantly.

Making matters worse, President Trump cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid last year. As a result, insurance prices and costs are increasing so that roughly 15 million Americans will lose their healthcare insurance over the next decade.

About 1.5 million people have already dropped their Affordable Care Act coverage as a result of the President's cuts. In my home State of Rhode Island, 10,000 people lost their health insurance. The President has created huge new costs for families, and households are stretched thin. Unsurprisingly, credit card balances hit a record $1.3 trillion at the end of last year. People are living month to month on their credit cards, and that is not a hopeful sign for working Americans.

But with the President's help, one set of Americans did exceptionally well in 2025: the ultrarich. Investment bank UBS reports that the number of U.S. billionaires jumped 11 percent last year with their combined wealth reaching $6.9 trillion dollars. That is trillion with a T.

Now if you dig a little deeper, you will see President Trump's billionaires are leaving the rest of America further and further behind. Billionaires' wealth grew 18 percent in 2025. In comparison, the average wage for Americans grew by about 4 percent--18 percent for the billionaires; 4 percent for working Americans.

As a result, wealth inequality--the gap between the ultrarich and the rest of us--is at a record high. According to the Federal Reserve, 32 percent of total U.S. wealth is now held by the top 1 percent of households.

That is a new record. It is a very uncomfortable record to observe. Let me say it again: 32 percent of the total wealth is now held by the top 1 percent.

That is not what America was designed to be. Frankly, that was not what generations of men and women in uniform fought to make America be. They weren't worried about making sure that billionaires had 5 yachts, 25 cars, and 7 mansions. They wanted to make sure that children got fed; that there was affordable housing; that families could not only get by but save a little and give their children a good chance in life.

Now there is a direct and likely intentional line between billionaire profits and the President's policies. President Trump's tax and spend plan was written specifically to help the wealthy, giving the top one-tenth of 1 percent--the top one-tenth of 1 percent--of Americans a $250,000 per year tax cut.

The rest of America--most of America--got little to nothing. Seventy percent of households received a tax cut below $1,700. What is the comparison? The ultrarich, $250,000 a year; working families, $1,700 a year. And this $1,700 is mostly wiped out by the President's tariffs and gasoline inflation costs.

And if you look at low-income Americans, the bottom 20 percent of earners, they lost money under the Big Beautiful Bill. And the story is the same for our ongoing oil price shock, which President Trump caused by unilaterally attacking Iran, despite knowing a war would close much of the global oil industry.

While working-class Americans are unsurprisingly paying the price, recent research found that during the last global oil shock following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans received about half of resulting global profits, with the vast majority of profits flowing across the top 10 percent of households. And that situation will likely be replicated now.

In other words, oil shocks seem to actually help the President's rich friends. Inflation predominantly hurts working- and middle-class Americans who have less wiggle room to cover high costs. And now the President is talking about making changes to the gasoline tax.

What he could do more appropriately is impose a limit on the amount of oil that could be exported from the United States and let the market cause gas prices to go down.

Now creating these new financial pains for Americans is economic malpractice, intentional or otherwise. This is not how a President should pursue economic policy. Our tax, healthcare, and broader economic system must be geared towards most Americans, not the privileged few. I am concerned that confirming Mr. Warsh to be Fed Chair will only enable President Trump to further ruin our economy by propping up the wealthy.

Like President Trump, Mr. Warsh has shown a proclivity for focusing on the interests of industry and wealth rather than the average American family. While previously at the Fed, Mr. Warsh pushed for higher interest rates during the great recession, a policy we know now, if followed, would have extended our recession and prevented many struggling Americans from finding work.

Before that, he was in charge of financial regulatory policy at the George W. Bush White House where he oversaw deregulatory policies that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

Now Mr. Warsh's new dovish monetary policy outlook is predicated on the belief that AI will turbocharge the economy, despite many economists projecting that AI adoption will eliminate huge swaths of middle-class jobs.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being successful and wealthy as Mr. Warsh certainly is. But when the only people appointed to serve in top economic posts have net worths in the hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions, often with intermingled business dealings, you must wonder if they are attuned to the needs of most Americans.

My focus is affordability, lowering housing costs, healthcare costs, and food and gas costs, and fixing our economic mess to better support hard-working Americans. Reorienting the Fed so the President can help billionaires moves the United States away from these goals.

I urge my colleagues to do what is best for the many Americans struggling with high prices and reject this nomination.

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