President Donald Trump has named Christopher Phelan as his next chief economist, an increasingly important role as the White House focuses on affordability and employment ahead of the midterm elections.
Assuming he is confirmed, Phelan will become chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, counseling the president on economic matters. He will replace acting CEA Chief Pierre Yared.
Yared is standing in for Stephen Miran, who left the CEA in September when Trump appointed him to fill a vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board.
“Miran was an ideological ally,” says Jacob Bastian, a senior economist at CEA during the Biden administration and an assistant professor of economics at Rutgers University. “We have less reason to think Phelan is going to be more ideological. It looks like he might be more of a technocratic type.”
In choosing Phelan, Bastian says the administration may have been trying to “signal seriousness.”
White House Spokesman Kush Desai says “Phelan is an eminently qualified pick to run the CEA and build on the tremendous legacy of Miran and Yared.”
Phelan is an economics professor at the University of Minnesota and a consultant to the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis, where he has worked since 1998. He attended the University of Chicago in the late 1980s, graduating with masters and doctorate degrees from its school of economics. While at the university, Phelan was a fellow at the conservative Bradley Foundation and at the Earhart Foundation, a now-closed nonprofit organization that backed libertarian and conservative academics.
His most recent academic work relates to how reputational concerns impact the monetary policy of central banks and how current account deficits impact future generations.
Leading the CEA is often a launchpad to more prominent roles in Washington. Past chairs include former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, former Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair Janet Yellen, and Cecilia Rouse, now president of the Brookings Institution.
As chair of the CEA, Phelan would lead a small team of economists that offers the White House economic analysis of domestic and international policies. The group briefs the president on the economy and works with the Treasury Department to set the administration’s economic outlook. It also writes public-facing reports, the most prominent of which is the annual Economic Report of the President, detailing the economic impact of the administration’s policies in the past year.
Another aspect of the job is interpreting economic data for the president. In Trump’s second term, doubts around some of that data originated at the CEA.
Last August, then-chair Miran told Barron’s he saw a “decline in the reliability of the data” released by federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The president echoed that belief repeatedly. In September, his administration launched an investigation into the bureau after firing its head.
Phelan didn’t respond to a request for comment on his views of the data.
“Phelan will be probably more neutral” than Miran, says Tomas Philipson, who was acting CEA chair under Trump from 2019 t0 2020. “Phelan will be different because he comes from an academic background, and Miran came from a commercial background.”
Still, Phelan often aligns himself on X with policies associated with Trump. As the administration began shrinking the federal workforce at the start of 2025, he wrote that the “federal civil service is unconstitutional.” During the record-long government shutdown in November, he called for Senate Republicans to “nuke the filibuster.” He also wrote that universities like Harvard should “start nuking” academic programs that he said mostly attract left-leaning academics. “Literally just close the department and fire everyone associated with it.”
Unlike Miran, Phelan doesn’t say the president’s tariffs can spark a large-scale manufacturing boom in the U.S.—although he isn’t a fan of free trade either.
“Your median economist very much is for free trade,” Phelan said last year. “I’m less so.”
Phelan split with Trump’s hallmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year. The OBBBA will add roughly $4 trillion to the federal deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“You should basically pay off your debt in good times and borrow in bad times and keep your taxes relatively smooth,” Phelan said about the legislation’s effects on the debt. “We’re kind of in good times now, so it’s not clear we want to run these big deficits.”
That division might not be a problem. Philipson says Trump likes disagreement among his economic advisors.
“He doesn’t like when everyone agrees because then he doesn’t learn as much,” Philipson says. “When people disagree, he gets to listen to the disagreement and then pull the trigger on either direction he wants to go.”
Phelan will be asked to testify before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs before advancing to a chamber-wide vote, where he will need a majority of votes to be confirmed. A hearing date hasn’t been announced.