Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh named more than a dozen external advisers to lead five task forces that will re-examine how the central bank operates, drawing mainly on academics, former central bankers and business executives.
Among the advisers: Greg Mankiw, a former top adviser in the George W. Bush administration, Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent, and Doug McMillon, former CEO of Walmart. There are also some wild cards, including conservative venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and two other movers and shakers from the tech world who will serve on a task force on employment.
The task forces, first announced by Warsh during his debut press conference last month, are the leading edge of an overhaul Warsh has pledged for the central bank. He has said his priorities include reducing the Fed's presence in financial markets, pulling back on guidance about future policy moves, and rethinking how the Fed uses statistics to understand the economy.
The task forces will focus on productivity, public communications, the central bank's asset portfolio, the drivers of inflation, and the quality of economic data used to guide policy decisions. Each will be led by three outside advisers.
They "will carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon," Warsh said in a statement.
The task forces are the machinery of an ambitious bet by Warsh: that he can persuade the Fed to unwind much of how it has operated since the 2008 financial crisis. Their power is only advisory. They report findings to the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which is under no obligation to act on them. Past Fed chairs have tasked a handful of members of that committee to propose communications changes, though such efforts have often produced relatively incremental results.
How far the effort goes to reshape the institution rather than produce a shelf of well-argued reports will depend on whether Warsh can bring along the Fed's governors, regional bank presidents, and career staff, some of whom built and still defend practices he wants to retire.
Here's a look at the five task forces.
AI, productivity and jobs
Few of the task-force members come from outside the expert class that has long driven Washington policy conversations -- except for the panel on jobs and the workforce. That group will be led by Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of the second Trump administration; Chad Jones, a Stanford professor who has worked with AI powerhouse Anthropic; and a Microsoft executive, Asha Sharma, who leads the Xbox videogames division.
Warsh, who previously served as a Fed governor from 2006-2011, developed closer ties with Silicon Valley during more than a decade as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. While under consideration to lead the Fed last year, he laid out an optimistic vision for how AI will reshape the economy, predicting it will help people and businesses work more productively. He wielded that vision to argue for lower interest rates, arguing that a more productive economy can grow rapidly without generating inflation.
Communications
Warsh already has made communications a focus for his agenda. The communications task force will be led by Peter Fisher, a former Treasury and New York Fed official; Arminio Fraga, a former head of Brazil's central bank; and Mervyn King, who ran the Bank of England for a decade.
King is a natural fit for a chairman skeptical of telegraphing the Fed's next move, but only up to a point. In a 2022 paper, he argued that forward guidance, or the practice of signaling where interest rates are headed, had become a liability. Rather than pencil in the expected path for rates, he said, a central bank should explain how it will react to a changing economy. "The communications of a central bank need to focus on ... developing a narrative about the state of the economy that changes over time meeting by meeting, report by report," he wrote in the paper.
Warsh's skepticism runs further. He has been wary of spelling out even that -- how the Fed will react to shifting conditions -- treating the central bank's efforts to describe its approach to decisions as a version of the same forward guidance he wants to shed.
The balance sheet
Harvard's Karen Dynan, former Fed governor Jeremy Stein and former Indian central bank head Raghuram Rajan will work on how the Fed should manage its multitrillion-dollar bondholdings. Warsh has been a longstanding critic of purchasing assets to stimulate economic activity, known as quantitative easing, when interest rates are pinned near zero.
Rajan has warned of the asymmetry in using QE by highlighting how paring back the balance sheet is harder than expanding it. A paper he co-wrote, presented at the Kansas City Fed's 2022 Jackson Hole symposium, highlighted how the process doesn't run cleanly in reverse. The result is a one-way ratchet: The borrowing and lending habits banks build up while the Fed is flooding the system with cash don't fade when it reverses course, leaving the financial system -- especially smaller, less-capitalized banks -- dependent on a level of cash that becomes risky to remove.
Inflation
Mankiw, Sargent and William White, a former adviser at the Bank for International Settlements, will revisit how the Fed understands and responds to inflation. The Fed conducted a framework overhaul in 2020, when it adopted a strategy meant to fix the opposite problem -- inflation that had run stubbornly below 2% for most of a decade. The Fed agreed to accept periods of slightly higher inflation to compensate for past shortfalls.
The framework almost immediately was cast aside when inflation subsequently surged to a four-decade high following the economic boom after the pandemic in 2021. The Fed formally scrapped the framework last year. Warsh wants a new inflation framework built for the current environment, but he has said little about what should take its place.
Economic data
The economic task force, to be led by McMillon, the former Walmart executive, and economists Raj Chetty and Kevin Murphy, will review how the Fed calibrates its read on economic activity in the first place.
Warsh has argued that policymakers lean too heavily on comprehensive government surveys with sagging response rates that were calibrated for how the economy functioned decades ago, in contrast with private companies he has said have access to more reliable information. "If we do our jobs, we'll be here a year from now and we'll say we've discovered data that helps us make better decisions," Warsh said at a conference last week where he laid out his ambitions.
Write to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com and Nick Timiraos at Nick.Timiraos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 09, 2026 17:34 ET (21:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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