Janet Yellen ’67, the first female chair of the Federal Reserve and first female secretary of the treasury department, received the Elliot L. Richardson Prize for Excellence in Public Service on Wednesday.
Yellen, a former member of The Herald’s business staff who graduated from Pembroke College with a degree in economics, served as the secretary of the treasury from 2021 to 2025 under former President Joe Biden.
In an interview with The Herald, Yellen spoke about her career in public service, the Trump administration’s recent actions against the Fed and the federal government’s attempts to implement sweeping tariffs.
Yellen described the award as a “tremendous honor,” because she sees former Attorney General Elliot Richardson — for whom the prize is named — as “someone who embodies integrity in public service.”
Richardson resigned in 1973 from his position as attorney general under former President Richard Nixon after a request to fire a prosecutor in the Watergate investigation. For Yellen, Richardson demonstrates “how possible it is to be highly ethical” in public service positions.
Even before Yellen got to college, she was always “very interested” in economic concepts, particularly because her parents grew up during the Great Depression, she told The Herald.
At Brown, Yellen had an “aha-awakening” about the causes of such financial crises and wanted to apply her studies in a “policy setting.” In the following years, Yellen “fostered (her) interest in economics,” learning the power of economic analysis in creating public policy.
“It’s where I really acquired the tools,” she said. “I had (a) wonderful education from terrific Brown professors, and it really started me off on a career that I found very rewarding.”
After leaving university, Yellen initially thought she would only spend a “year or two” in a public policy-oriented career.
“But once I saw how satisfying it was, I was very open to having a much larger share of my career be in public service,” she said.
Yellen was nominated by former President Barack Obama to serve as chair of the Fed from 2014 to 2018 and was succeeded by current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
On Jan. 11, the Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into Powell, which Powell attributed to his resistance to President Trump’s desire to lower interest rates. In her interview with The Herald, Yellen described Powell as “an extremely honorable and upstanding individual.”
“I strongly doubt he’s guilty of anything that’s been alleged,” she said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Yellen believes that “there can be nothing political” about how the Fed achieves the goals assigned by Congress, which are “namely maximum employment and price stability.”
“What I’d be doing if I was (at the Fed), is I’d be doing my job, and I would try to stay above the fray and just continue to set policy in the best way I think would advance these goals,” Yellen said. “And I think that’s exactly what they have been doing.”
For Yellen, it’s important that the Fed remain independent from external pressure because “it's all too easy…to use monetary policy for political purposes.”
If a country’s central bank was not independent, federal administrations could attempt to impact elections, she explained. For example, they could “try to juice up the economy to lower the unemployment rate in the run up to an election so things feel good to people,” she said.
But in the long run, such practices “typically” cause inflation, which can cause a central bank to “have to tighten up, which ultimately raises both inflation and unemployment,” Yellen said.
Yellen added that Trump’s request that the Fed set interest rates at 1% or lower to finance the country’s deficits is “precisely the kind of reasoning that leads to policies that will cause extremely high inflation” and “what history shows will be damaging to the United States.”
Yellen believes that if Trump’s efforts to control the Fed are successful, “they’ll change the Fed as an institution.”
“We’ll have a Fed that responds to political pressure and the goals of an administration,” she added, noting that “he’s weaponized the Department of Justice against his enemies.”
On Wednesday, the Fed announced that it would be holding interest rates steady.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has also threatened and attempted to leverage sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, including U.S. allies like Canada. On Monday, Trump announced an increased tariff rate from 15% to 25% on South Korean imports.
Yellen believes Trump’s tariff implementation is “harmful to the United States as well as to other countries.” She emphasized that in her view, the purpose of these tariffs has remained unclear.
“One possibility is that they’re intended to reduce the large U.S. trade deficit,” she said. “Most economists believe and teach in undergraduate courses, like the ones that I took at Brown, that this is not a strategy that will be successful.”
Yellen explained that the tariffs place a “heavy burden on American consumers,” particularly on the “lowest income households.”
“The surest way to reduce the trade deficit would be to get our federal budget deficit under control, and when that’s been tried in the past, it has worked,” she added.
To Yellen, President Trump’s actions targeting higher education funding pose an additional threat to the American economy. These actions “threaten a tremendous source of strength of the American economy: the ability to innovate, to bring scholars here who contribute tremendously to America’s success.”
Samah Hamid is a senior staff writer at the Herald. She is from Sharon, Massachusetts and plans to concentrate in Biology. In her free time, you can find her taking a nap, reading, or baking a sweet treat.
