Jerome H. Powell
Member of the Board of Governors
From the Board's official biography
Listed by the Board as: Jerome H. Powell
Jerome H. Powell first took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on May 25, 2012, to fill an unexpired term.
Jerome H. Powell first took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on May 25, 2012, to fill an unexpired term. He was reappointed to the Board and sworn in on June 16, 2014, for a term ending January 31, 2028. Mr. Powell served as chair of the Board of Governors and chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policymaking body, from February 5, 2018, to May 22, 2026.
Prior to his appointment to the Board, Mr. Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where he focused on federal and state fiscal issues. From 1997 through 2005, Mr. Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group.
Mr. Powell served as an Assistant Secretary and as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury under President George H.W. Bush, with responsibility for policy on financial institutions, the Treasury debt market, and related areas. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Mr. Powell worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City.
In addition to service on corporate boards, he has served on the boards of charitable and educational institutions, including the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University and the Nature Conservancy of Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
Mr. Powell was born in February 1953 in Washington, D.C. He received an AB in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. While at Georgetown, he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.
Quoted verbatim from the Board of Governors' biography of Jerome H. Powell, a U.S. Government work in the public domain. Retrieved Sep 2, 2026, 2:26 a.m. ET. Nothing above is written by this site.
What a governor does
The Board of Governors has seven seats. Every governor is a permanent voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the target range for the federal funds rate, and shares in the Board's other work: supervising the largest banks, setting reserve requirements and the discount rate, and overseeing the twelve regional Reserve Banks.
A full term is fourteen years, and the terms are staggered so that one expires every two years. The length is deliberate. It is meant to outlast any single President, so that a governor's decisions are not made with the next election in mind. A governor appointed to fill an unexpired term can be reappointed to a full one; a governor who has served a full term cannot.
How the Chair is chosen
The Chair and the two Vice Chairs are governors first. They are designated to those roles by the President from among the sitting governors, for four-year terms, and each designation is confirmed separately by the Senate. A Chair whose four-year designation ends can remain on the Board as a governor for the rest of their fourteen-year term.
The Chair presides over the Board and the FOMC, testifies to Congress twice a year, and gives the press conference after each meeting. On the Committee itself, the Chair holds one vote of twelve.
Where this fits
The full current roster, the twelve districts and the plain-language primer are on What is the Federal Reserve?. The meeting schedule is on the FOMC calendar.