With Powell set to move on, who are the candidates for the next Fed chair?

Several candidates have been publicly identified to serve as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, with current Chair Jerome Powell‘s term coming to an end in May.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in October that he would give President Donald Trump “three or four candidates for him to interview” shortly after Thanksgiving.

Trump, however, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that “I think I already know my choice,” multiple outlets reported.

It’s expected that the nominee will first be appointed as a Federal Reserve governor before later being nominated as chair. Although Powell’s term ends in May, his governor’s seat runs for another two years.

CNBC previously reported on Oct. 10 that the five candidates are Michelle “Miki” Bowman, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision; Fed Governor Christopher Waller; Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council; former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh; and BlackRock executive Rick Rieder.

Michelle Bowman

Bowman is an attorney who has served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2018, when Trump appointed her during his first term. Coming from a community banking background, she is the first person to hold the board’s community bank seat, which was created by a 2015 law.

Previously, Bowman was the Kansas banking commissioner from January 2017 to November 2018, and held senior roles at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.

In March 2025, after seven years on the Federal Reserve board, Trump nominated Bowman to succeed Michael Barr as the Fed’s vice chair for supervision.

Christopher Waller

Waller, also a Trump nominee, has been a Fed board member since 2020. He is set to serve in his position through 2030.

Previously, Waller served as the research director and executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He has publicly favored further cuts to interest rates.

Speaking recently at an economics conference in London, Waller referenced labor market data and said, “This reading of the data leads me, at this moment, to support a cut in the FOMC’s policy rate at our next meeting on Dec. 9 and 10 as a matter of risk management.”

Kevin Hassett

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, was appointed to the role this year. He formerly served as senior adviser and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019, then returned in 2020 to advise the Trump administration on its economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hassett has also worked at the American Enterprise Institute and advised Republican presidential campaigns, including those of John McCain, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.

Hassett recently defended Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal, telling reporters on Nov. 10 that “it’s something that we take very seriously as a policy challenge. And extending the length of mortgages could reduce monthly payments by hundreds of dollars.”

Despite his lack of tenure at the Fed, The Economic Times has called Hassett the “leading candidate” for the role, citing his eight years of work with Trump and a brief stint at Jared Kushner’s (Trump’s son-in-law) private equity firm.

Kevin Warsh

Warsh previously served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 to 2011. During that time, he served as the Fed’s main liaison to Wall Street and represented the central bank at the G20 Summit.

Warsh was also a special assistant for economic policy and executive secretary of the National Economic Council under George W. Bush.

Currently, Warsh is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a member of the Group of Thirty and the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers.

In June 2025, he was reported as a leading candidate to succeed Powell. In November, Walsh authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled, “The Federal Reserve’s Broken Leadership,” in which he called inflation “a choice” and petitioned for reform of monetary and regulatory policy.

“The Fed’s track record under Chairman Jerome Powell is one of unwise choices. The Fed should re-examine its great mistakes that led to the great inflation,” Warsh wrote. “The Fed’s bloated balance sheet, designed to support the biggest firms in a bygone crisis era, can be reduced significantly.”

Rick Rieder

Rick Rieder is BlackRock’s chief investment officer of global fixed income. He heads the firm’s fundamental fixed income business and its global allocation investment team, overseeing roughly $2.4 trillion in assets. He serves on BlackRock’s Global Executive Committee and chairs the BlackRock Investment Council.

Rieder, like Hassett, has never held a Fed board role. He also sits on the investment advisory committees for Alphabet/Google and UBS Research. He has previously served as vice chairman of the U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee and as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Investment Advisory Committee on Financial Markets.

In a September interview with Bloomberg Television, Rieder said that the housing market is “stuck” and called for bringing costs down.