Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, during a hearing in Washington, DC, USA, on Thursday, March 26, 2026.
Aaron Schwartz | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a sharp letter to Federal Reserve Chairman nominee Kevin Warsh on Thursday. In it, she predicted he would serve as a “rubber stamp for President Trump’s Wall Street First agenda” and accused him of “not learning from your mistakes” during a previous stint at the central bank.
Warren, D-Mass., told Warsh in the letter, first reported by CNBC, that his record as a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011 — including the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Great Recession — “should disqualify you from promotion.”
“But President Donald Trump has vowed that ‘anyone who disagrees with him will never be Fed chairman,'” Warren noted.
“And you apparently passed his test,” she added.
“As Fed Chair, you are responsible for taking economic-altering actions that have serious consequences
“However, your track record before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis raises significant concerns about your ability to do so.”
The letter, obtained by CNBC before it was released publicly, asked Warsh targeted, detailed questions on 10 different topic areas to be answered for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, where Warren is the ranking Democrat.
But those questions were buried at the end of a scathing eight-page indictment of his tenure at the Fed and his advocacy “against tighter safeguards to prevent major bank failures and tax bailouts” after he left the central bank.
“I am writing to you to better understand what, if anything, you learned from your failure to prioritize American families over Wall Street as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis,” Warren said in the first sentence of the letter.
“Instead of implementing policies to improve the lives of the American public, you ignored the apparent excessive risk-taking on Wall Street. You worked tirelessly to bail out major financial institutions after their bets blew up the economy, and you championed policies that would have done even more harm to the millions of Americans who lost jobs, were forced from their homes and saw their savings wiped out,” she continued.
Warsh declined to comment on the letter.
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Warsh’s nomination is in limbo because Warren’s colleague on the Banking Committee, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., has said he would effectively block consideration of the nomination by the full Senate until a criminal investigation into Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is completed.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has indicated she has no intention of dropping the investigation.
Pirro’s office is seeking to overturn a March 11 ruling by a federal judge in Washington blocking subpoenas issued to the Fed as part of its investigation into Powell, which is said to focus on cost overruns in the costly renovation of the Fed’s headquarters and testimony about that project before the Banking Committee.
District Judge James Boasberg wrote in his order quashing those subpoenas: “There is ample evidence that the primary purpose (if not the sole purpose) of the subpoenas is to harass and pressure Powell to either defer to the President or resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will do so.”
Trump has repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushed Powell and the entire Board of Governors to cut interest rates faster and deeper than they have done since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
Powell said in early March he would stay on as interim chairman if Warsh is not confirmed by May, when Powell’s term as chairman expires.
In her letter to Warsh on Thursday, Warren said that when he began serving on the board of governors, there were “warning signs of the coming crisis” in the subprime housing loan market.
“Yet instead of using the Fed’s powerful supervisory and regulatory authorities to address the serious risks to consumers and financial stability posed by subprime mortgages, you have defended and even implicitly promoted these products,” Warren wrote.
“Surprisingly, in December 2007, you agreed that “subprime mortgages have a bad reputation.”
“In this environment, they have also promoted derivatives and other forms of ‘financial innovation’ to spread risk and make the financial system safer.”
“Again, you were wrong.”
Warren said that during the resulting financial crisis, “you appear to have prioritized the interests of large financial institutions over the interests of the American public.”
“Your willingness to save Wall Street, including through taxpayer-backed mega-mergers, was not surprising given the seven years you spent as a mergers and acquisitions manager at Morgan Stanley before joining the George W. Bush administration,” Warren wrote.
“It is well documented that you played a central role in organizing numerous events [multibillion-dollar] bailouts and even received an ethics exemption to negotiate directly with Morgan Stanley, which quickly received the special regulatory approvals from the Fed needed to access additional emergency aid.
The senator said Warsh also advocated for higher interest rates at the time, which “further jeopardized an ailing economy” that led to job losses.
“Your monetary policy record shows a repeated failure to accurately assess the impact of inflation on the American economy,” Warren wrote.
“It seems you have not learned from your mistakes,” she wrote.
“Since you left the Fed, you have advocated against tighter safeguards to prevent major bank failures and tax bailouts.”
– CNBC’s Matt Peterson contributed to this article.
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