Michelle W. Bowman
Vice Chair for Supervision
From the Board's official biography
Listed by the Board as: Michelle W. Bowman, Vice Chair for Supervision
Initially appointed to fill the remainder of an unexpired term, she was reappointed for a full 14-year term that ends on January 31, 2034.
Michelle W. Bowman has been serving as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System since November 26, 2018. Initially appointed to fill the remainder of an unexpired term, she was reappointed for a full 14-year term that ends on January 31, 2034. On June 9, 2025, Bowman was sworn in as the third Vice Chair for Supervision and is responsible for overseeing the supervision and regulation of depository institution holding companies and other financial firms supervised by the Board.
As the only member of the Board with banking and state supervisory experience, she chairs the Board's Subcommittee on Smaller and Regional Community Banking, and serves on the Board's Payments, Clearing, and Settlement Committee.
In addition to her work at the Board, Bowman chairs the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, an interagency body tasked with promoting consistency in financial examinations. Her international roles include serving on the Governors and Heads of Supervision group of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and as the U.S. Plenary member of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), where she chairs the FSB's Standing Committee on Supervisory and Regulatory Cooperation. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Financial Stability Institute of the Bank for International Settlements.
Prior to her appointment to the Board, she served as the Kansas state bank commissioner from January 2017 to November 2018, and as vice president of Farmers & Drovers Bank in Kansas from 2010 to 2017. Her past public service includes serving as a deputy assistant secretary and policy adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, director of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and counsel to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, as well as working for Kansas Senator Bob Dole.
Following her time in Washington, Bowman led a government and public affairs consultancy in London before returning to Kansas in 2010. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas and a JD from the Washburn University School of Law. Bowman is a member of the New York State Bar.
Quoted verbatim from the Board of Governors' biography of Michelle W. Bowman, a U.S. Government work in the public domain. Retrieved Sep 2, 2026, 9:58 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.