Trump says he will nominate supply-side advocate Stephen Moore for Fed board seat

Moore is also an on-air CNN contributor and founder and former president of the conservative political organization Club for Growth. He was also a major advocate of the 2017 Republican tax law.

Moore told the Washington Examiner earlier Friday that the job has not been formally offered yet.

“It’s not been formally offered,” Moore said in a brief interview. “I just talked to some of the folks at the [National Economic Council] about it.”

He said he had not spoken to Trump about a potential nomination. “It’s not a done deal,” Moore continued. “If I were offered the job I would certainly take it.”

White House press staff declined to comment.

Moore has advocated for Trump’s preferred monetary policies in recent months, going so far as to call on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to resign in a December blog post that echoed Trump’s criticism of the Fed for raising its interest rate target.

“Trump wants to fire the Fed chairman, though it is doubtful he has the authority to do that,” wrote Moore. “Much better for Powell to do the honorable thing and admit that his policies have had disastrous economic and financial consequences and resign.”

That criticism was a departure from Moore’s own past support for higher interest rates. In a 2011 column, Moore criticized former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke for refusing to raise interest rates.

“[T]he Fed refused to raise interest rates off zero in September, and, hello, that easy money policy is how we got into the mess in 2000 and then in 2008,” wrote Moore. “Wall Street cheered Janet Yellen’s decision to keep the cheap dollars flowing. Isn’t this all starting to sound familiar?”

During the last Congress, Trump nominated Carnegie Mellon economist Marvin Goodfriend and Nellie Liang, a former senior Fed staffer and current scholar at the Brookings Institution, for the open seats on the Fed’s board. Goodfriend faced opposition from at least one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an outspoken critic of the Fed, while Liang, a Democrat, withdrew from consideration in the face of opposition from Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee. It’s unclear which seat Moore might take.

A spokesperson for Sen. Mike Crapo R-Idaho, the Banking Committee’s chairman, said that the committee had yet to receive an official nomination and declined to comment further. A spokesperson for Sen. Sherrod Brown D-Ohio, the committee’s top Democrat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moore’s nomination would have to be approved by the committee.

Moore, a longtime pundit, has a master’s degree in economics, but not a PhD. He also advised Trump on economic policy during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign and in office, which is likely to raise questions about his independence.

“That’s certainly an accusation that he’s going to hear,” said James Pethokoukis, an economic policy analyst for the American Enterprise Institute. “He’s not a PhD economist, he’s mostly been a journalist, and an opinion journalist,”

Pethokoukis noted that in addition to his about-face on interest rates, Moore, like Trump, also shrugs off deficit spending and increasing the national debt.

Several prominent economists decried Moore’s nomination on social media.

“Stephen Moore is unfit to serve on the Fed Board,” George Selgin, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter shortly after the announcement. “A very poor choice, though one that would suits Trump’s own purposes. I hope Congress will do the right thing and refuse to affirm him.”