Trump Cabinet meeting: New Fed chair, coal saving lives, Russia and Ukraine

By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

The administration will announce its pick for a new Federal Reserve chair next week. Coal-powered energy saved lives during Winter Storm Fern. An impending Russia-Ukraine peace deal is coming. A million people have signed their babies up for new $1,000 accounts. President Donald Trump held a shorter-than-usual cabinet meeting Thursday, the first of the new year, and these are some of the highlights that were shared.

New Fed chair to come

After a year of publicly pressuring and mocking Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not lowering interest rates to the president’s liking, Trump said Thursday that the administration plans to announce its replacement pick next week. Powell’s term is up in May, and the Fed’s reduction of interest rates by 0.75% for 2025 does not appear to have dampened Trump’s frustration with the board. In fact, the administration opened a criminal investigation into Powell in January related to his Senate testimony about the over-budget renovation of Federal Reserve office buildings.

Powell has said that the Fed has been reluctant to lower rates too quickly because it doesn’t want inflation to rise, but Trump has criticized the Fed for being too cautious and holding back the economy. Trump said Thursday the U.S. could achieve GDP growth of about eight, nine or 10% with better policies from the central bank.

“They’re afraid of inflation. But growth doesn’t have to have any impact on inflation. It can make inflation go down, in many cases, so, and you’ve seen that with us, maybe we’re growing at a much faster rate than anybody thought was possible,” Trump said. “And by the way, if inflation comes, we’ll take care of it when it comes. But you know, they’re trying to guess it, and they’re trying to get it 10 years before, in advance.”

Oil, gas & “Clean, beautiful coal”

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright relayed some energy statistics during the meeting, including that “U.S. oil production today is greater than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined” and that American natural gas production today is “greater than Russia, China and Iran combined, the second, third and fourth largest natural gas producers.”

But Wright then shifted to a statistic tied to conditions still unfolding for many Americans now in the wake of Winter Storm Fern. Wright said that the storm’s effects would have been much worse had it not been for the administration’s policies on coal.

“I can say with some confidence, hundreds of American lives have been saved because of your leaning in and stopping the killing of coal,” Wright told the president. “Over 200 people died in a smaller cold snap during the Biden administration. This was massively larger.”

The Daily Caller reported Thursday that at least 80 have died from the storm. The death toll will likely continue to rise until the record cold lifts.

Wright said that coal had delivered “20 times more electricity than solar and batteries” over the last few days.

“Geographically, we’ve had no failure of the electricity grid, no failure of long-distance transmission lines,” Wright said.

Wright acknowledged that there are still people without power – roughly 235,000 people in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to a national power outage map – but those are reportedly mostly due to local distribution lines.

Coming peace deal in Russia & Ukraine?

The president said Thursday that the administration had been making “a lot of progress” on the Russia-Ukraine war and asked Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who attended the cabinet meeting, to elaborate.

“Ukrainians actually said that we’ve made more progress since Geneva than they’ve seen in the last four years of that conflict,” Witkoff said. “I think the people of Ukraine are now hopeful and expectant that we’re going to deliver a peace deal sometime soon.”

Witkoff and others also recently met with five Russian generals in Abu Dhabi.

The parties have been discussing a land deal and have mostly finished a security protocol agreement as well as a “prosperity agreement,” according to Witkoff.

“The talks will continue in about a week,” he added.

There are current reports of ongoing attacks, however, and intransigence from Russian leaders.

Trump Accounts

This program officially launched Wednesday, marked by a special announcement from the Trump administration with rapper Nicki Minaj. The government will contribute $1,000 to tax-advantaged investment accounts for babies born between 2025 and 2028, but American citizens under the age of 18 can also open an account.

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that 600,000 American children had been enrolled, and Thursday, the number had risen to 1 million.

“We’ve now had a million people sign up for Trump accounts just this week,” Bessent said.