Senator Thom Tillis just dropped his hold on Kevin Warsh’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve, which means President Trump is about to take control of the one institution the Washington establishment has fought hardest to keep out of his hands.
Pop quiz: what took him so long?
Tillis had been blocking the nomination for weeks over what he called a “bogus” and “vindictive” DOJ investigation into current Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The probe — launched by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office back in January — was looking into cost overruns on the Fed’s headquarters renovation in Washington. The building project ballooned from $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion, and somebody thought it would be clever to turn that into a criminal case against Powell.
A federal judge disagreed. In March, the judge quashed the subpoenas and said their actual purpose was “to harass and pressure Powell to resign.” A prosecutor on the case even admitted they’d found zero evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Zero. As in none. As in *why are we still talking about this?*
Tillis played the “Fed independence” card, saying he needed assurances the DOJ wasn’t being weaponized against Powell. And look — we get it. Nobody wants the DOJ used as a political hammer. We spent four years watching Democrats do exactly that to Trump. But here’s the thing: the investigation is over. Pirro closed it on Friday. The whole mess got punted to the Fed’s own inspector general, which is where a building renovation cost dispute should have been in the first place.
So Tillis got his assurances, declared the probe “completely and fully ended,” and stepped aside. The Senate Banking Committee has a vote scheduled for Wednesday. If all goes according to plan, Warsh gets confirmed before Powell’s term expires on May 15th.
And then things get very interesting.
Kevin Warsh isn’t some establishment placeholder. He’s Trump’s guy. He served on the Fed’s Board of Governors during the 2008 financial crisis and has been openly critical of the Fed’s money-printing addiction ever since. While Jerome Powell was busy juicing the economy with cheap money during COVID and then acting surprised when inflation showed up like an uninvited cousin at Thanksgiving, Warsh was warning that exactly this would happen.
The Federal Reserve is the last major lever of economic power that’s been operating on autopilot since the Obama years. The Supreme Court? Secured. The executive agencies? Getting cleaned out by DOGE. The intelligence community? Under new management. But the Fed — the institution that controls interest rates, money supply, and basically decides whether your mortgage payment goes up or down — has been sitting there untouched, running the same playbook regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Not anymore.
The establishment threw everything they had at keeping Trump away from the Fed. They launched a bogus criminal investigation into the sitting chairman. They got a Republican senator to block the nomination. They played every delay card in the deck. And it all fell apart in about three months because the investigation was garbage, the judge said so publicly, and the math in the Senate was never going to work in their favor.
Tillis didn’t have some principled change of heart. He read the room. The hold was going nowhere, the investigation collapsed under its own weight, and continuing to block Trump’s nominee was going to make him the most unpopular Republican in Washington — which is saying something when Mitt Romney’s ghost still haunts the hallways.
So where does this leave us? Trump is about to install his own Fed chair with weeks to spare before Powell’s term runs out. The Senate committee vote is Wednesday. The full floor vote follows shortly after. And barring some kind of last-minute circus — which, honestly, we should never rule out because this is Washington — Kevin Warsh will be running the Federal Reserve before Memorial Day.
The same people who told us Trump would crash the economy, start World War III, and personally bankrupt every American family are now about to watch him take the steering wheel on monetary policy. They’re terrified. And honestly? That’s how you know it’s a good move.
Trump came for the agencies. He came for the courts. He came for the intelligence community. And now he’s coming for the money printer. The establishment is running out of places to hide.