President Donald Trump laid out his preferences for the Federal Reserve’s top job on Friday, naming three individuals he sees as strong contenders to take over from Jerome Powell when the current chair’s term expires in May 2026.
In a direct exchange with reporters, Trump outlined his thinking: “I am considering former Fed board member Kevin Warsh, current Fed board member Christopher Waller, and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett for the role.”
The timing of this disclosure aligns with mounting frustration over the Fed’s recent decisions. Trump has not held back in expressing his dissatisfaction with Powell, whom he appointed in 2017 but later accused of moving too slowly on rate cuts. Just this week, following a disappointing jobs report, Trump took to Truth Social to label Powell “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell,” arguing he “should have lowered rates long ago.”
Critics within Trump’s circle, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have echoed this sentiment, pointing to the central bank’s policies as a drag on growth amid cooling inflation and sluggish hiring. Bessent himself was once in the mix for the chairmanship but has chosen to stay put at Treasury, clearing the path for these other names. With Powell’s departure on the horizon, Trump’s shortlist signals a push toward appointees who could align more closely with an agenda prioritizing rapid economic expansion.
Among the frontrunners is Kevin Hassett, currently steering the National Economic Council as its director. Hassett brings a wealth of experience from his time in Trump’s first term, where he chaired the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019. During that stint, he championed tax cuts and deregulation as engines for job creation and wage growth, often clashing with establishment economists who favored more cautious fiscal paths. A conservative thinker with roots in academia—he taught economics at Columbia University—Hassett has long argued for policies that unleash private sector potential without overreliance on government intervention.
Trump’s nod to Hassett in the quote highlights a trusted insider who understands the president’s vision for America First economics. If selected, Hassett could steer the Fed toward a more accommodative stance on rates, potentially easing borrowing costs for businesses and families at a pivotal moment for recovery.
Kevin Warsh, the former Fed board member referenced in Trump’s remarks, offers a blend of insider knowledge and independent streak that could appeal to those seeking reform at the central bank. Warsh served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011, a period that included the height of the financial crisis. There, he played a key role in crisis response but also voiced concerns about the Fed’s growing balance sheet and its drift into fiscal territory, advocating for a return to core monetary functions.
Before joining the Fed, Warsh worked as a special assistant to President George W. Bush on economic policy and later at Morgan Stanley. Now a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he has been floated as a Fed chair candidate before, including in 2017 during Trump’s initial search. By including Warsh in his shortlist, as Trump explicitly stated, the president appears to value someone with proven crisis chops who might prioritize transparency and restraint over expansive interventions—qualities that could temper the Fed’s recent rate-hiking fervor.
Rounding out the trio is Christopher Waller, the current Fed board member whom Trump himself nominated in 2020. Waller’s path to the central bank was unconventional for a governor: a Midwestern economist with a blue-collar upbringing, he spent years as a professor at Notre Dame and as executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, focusing on monetary theory and payments systems.
Unlike some ivory-tower academics, Waller’s practical bent—rooted in degrees from Washington State University and early work in rural banking—has made him a voice for real-world economic pressures. His inclusion in Trump’s quoted list suggests continuity with past appointments, but also an opportunity for elevation. As someone already embedded in the Fed’s structure, Waller could facilitate a smoother transition while potentially advocating for the rate relief Trump has demanded.
This selection process reflects broader tensions between the White House and the Fed, where Trump’s push for lower rates clashes with Powell’s data-dependent approach. Each of these candidates—Hassett with his policy advocacy, Warsh with his governance experience, and Waller with his institutional insight—brings elements that could reshape monetary policy in ways more attuned to the administration’s goals.
As the May deadline approaches, the choice will carry weighty implications for everything from mortgage rates to stock markets, underscoring Trump’s determination to imprint his economic priorities on one of the nation’s most powerful institutions.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
