About Janet Yellen
Janet Yellen, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Biden and previously chaired the Federal Reserve, has been publicly commenting on the Trump administration's economic policies and their impact on the Federal Reserve's independence. In January 2026, Yellen described a criminal investigation launched by the Trump Justice Department into Fed Chair Jerome Powell as "extremely chilling" for Fed independence, stating that she believes the administration is "weaponizing" the Department of Justice to go after people it disagrees with. She said the probe is "really about wanting to intimidate Fed leadership to be able to control monetary policy decisions, to bend monetary policy to the president's will." Yellen also commented on President Trump's removal of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, calling it "a pretext to justify an autocratic power grab."
Yellen has also been critical of the Trump administration's tariff policies. In April 2025, she described the tariff program as "the worst self-inflicted wound" she has ever seen imposed on a well-functioning economy, and said the rationale for the tariffs was "unclear and not at all sensible." She estimated that the tariffs could cost the average American household around $4,000 per year. Yellen has also commented on the national debt and fiscal policy. In exchanges with Senator John Kennedy, she defended the Biden administration's budget proposals, stating that the president's budget "has improved the fiscal outlook relative to what we would have without the president's proposals" and that "revenue increases far exceed proposed investments." She also stated that she does not expect the overall level of prices to go down to pre-pandemic levels, but argued that because wages have risen, the median worker can buy the same basket of goods as in 2019 with $1,400 left over.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Janet Yellen's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Janet Yellen0:00
At this point, I see the US economy as performing well. Domestic spending has been growing at a solid pace. Our trade performance, net exports, is soft. But the committee judged in October that some of the downside risks had diminished, relating to global economic and financial developments. I see underutilization of labor resources as having diminished significantly since earlier in the year, although recently we have seen some slowdown in the pace of job gains. So with that sort of backdrop in mind, and of course inflation, I should say, is running considerably below our 2% objective. Nevertheless, the committee judges that an important reason for that relates to declines in energy prices and the prices of non-energy imports, and that as those matters stabilize, inflation will move back up to our 2% target. So with that sort of economic backdrop in mind, the committee indicated in our most recent statement that we thought it could be appropriate to adjust rates at our next meeting. Now, no decision at all has been made on that, and what it will depend on is the committee's assessment of the economic outlook at that time, and that assessment will be informed by all of the data that we receive between now and then. So what the committee has been expecting is that the economy will continue to grow at a pace that's sufficient to generate further improvements in the labor market and to return inflation to our 2% target over the medium term. And if the incoming information supports that expectation, then our statement indicates that December would be a live possibility. But importantly, we've made no decision about it now. It is, as you asked about the timing of such a move, the committee does feel that moving in a timely fashion, if the data and the outlook justify such a move, is a prudent thing to do, because we will be able to move at a more gradual and measured pace. We fully expect that the economy will evolve in such a way that we can move at a very gradual pace, and of course after we do so, we will be watching very carefully whether our expectations are realized. So when my colleague Governor Brainard mentions that inflation is low, if we were to move, say, in December, it would be based on an expectation, which I believe is justified, that with an improving labor market and transitory factors fading, that inflation will move up to 2%. But of course, if we were to move, we would need to verify over time that expectation was being realized, and if not, to just adjust policy appropriately. I think I'd also like to emphasize that I know there's a great deal of focus on the initial move. It's been a long time that interest rates have been at zero, but markets and the public should be thinking about the entire path of policy rates over time, and the committee's expectation is that that will be a very gradual path, and of course will depend very much on the actual performance of the economy.
