Who Sits at the Fed’s Table? Part I

How FOMC meetings and the Federal Reserve’s internal governance have evolved over time

This week’s Supreme Court arguments over President Trump’s attempt to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook have put an unusually bright spotlight on a question most people rarely stop to consider: what, exactly, is the Federal Reserve as an institution and how did its internal governance come to look the way it does? While the headlines focus on removal protections and presidential power, the deeper issue is the Fed’s evolving architecture: who sits at the table, who doesn’t, and how those patterns have changed over time.

Readers of this newsletter will recognize this theme from an earlier guest post by Kaleb Nygaard, where he dug up the largely forgotten history of how the Board of Governors has repeatedly redrawn the Fed’s district map under Section 2 of the Federal Reserve Act. This post continues that same institutional archaeology but turns inward, going from geography to governance.

In Part I of this new two-part series, Kaleb draws on a painstakingly assembled dataset from the minutes of every FOMC meeting since 1936 to document how the mechanics of monetary policymaking have evolved: when the Committee meets, how often, who attends, and how dramatically staff presence has expanded over time. The result is a set of striking charts that challenge the notion that today’s FOMC practices were fixed at the Fed’s founding. Part II, coming out early next week, will dig deeper into vacancies and absences at the FOMC. It also reveals how often seats on the Board of Governors and among Reserve Bank presidents have gone unfilled and what it meant for Fed decision making.

To cap it off, Kaleb and I will be hosting a Substack Live next week to discuss both articles and their implications. With that context in mind, here is Part I of Kaleb’s new series.

Meeting Attendance at the FOMC: Part I

By Kaleb Nygaard

It’s easy to think that the rules were always so. That the routines were set in the founding days. The current state feels so natural. I’ve been an armchair Fed historian for more than a decade now and done dozens of these massive qualitative data analyses of old Fed documents. Yet each one surprises me with how much evolution it shows at the central bank. Below, I present the first in a two-part series with multiple charts that illustrate the evolution of the Federal Open Market Committee’s meetings.

This dataset is based on attendance records in the minutes of every single FOMC meeting from March 18, 1936, to December 10, 2025. The full dataset is available in this spreadsheet.

Executive sessions were recorded for the first twenty years, and as you can see in the first chart below, they represented approximately half of the total number of meetings held. Executive meetings refer to closed, internal sessions of the FOMC that were especially common in the Fed’s early decades. Attendance at these meetings was typically limited to the Board of Governors (or its predecessors), a small number of Reserve Bank presidents—often just New York—and a handful of senior staff such as the Secretary of the FOMC or the Manager of the System Open Market Account. Unlike regular policy meetings, executive sessions were used to handle sensitive administrative matters, operational details of open market operations, and other confidential issues, and therefore were recorded separately in the minutes. Most of the charts after this first one exclude the executive meetings because my primary focus on collecting this data was to chart attendance by the FOMC and Fed staffers from around the system.

Teleconferences began in the mid-1950s and were obviously the only way the committee met from February 2020 to November 2021. And for purposes of my dataset, I count a meeting as one day, hence the modern base count is 16, for the eight, two-day meetings, held approximately every six weeks these days.

Moving on to the next chart, we see that more meetings have been held on Tuesdays than every other day of the week combined.

Though it’s interesting to see a shift from Monday-Tuesday two-day meetings to the Tuesday-Wednesday sessions the Fed follows today.

One can’t have read Lords of Finance, or any Fed history book for that matter, and not have pondered the differences from today in what it meant “to work”. The head of the Bank of England or Federal Reserve Bank of New York taking off for months would be quite concerning today, but happened multiple times in the interwar period. And although I didn’t track sick-leave specifically, and Strong died before the FOMC was formally constituted, this example of meeting start-time left me with similar vibes. Average and modal start times for morning meetings (often the second day of meetings), shifted a full hour and a half from 10:30am to 9am.

Afternoon meetings, defined as starting after 12pm and historically the first day in two-day sessions, also became earlier. Though afternoon meetings aren’t nearly as common as morning meetings.

And now I’ll shift your attention from the “when” of the meetings to the “who”. This next chart might be my favorite one. It clearly shows the massive expansion of staff that is welcomed into the committee meetings, from a small handful for the first few years to approximately the same number as the FOMC through the 1950s. After that, the number of staff to FOMC double until around the turn of the century, when staff participation begins to grow, and grow, and grow. Last year’s average total meeting attendance surpassed 100 and the record attendance at an FOMC meeting was June 16-17, 2025 with 96 staffers.

I’m explicitly not going to comment on the pros and cons or optimal meeting size in today’s post, but the data in and of itself is fascinating.

Now let’s zoom in on the key players - the policymakers themselves. Amazing to think that something near full attendance wasn’t reached until the late-1950s. We’ll get into who was missing below.

But first, let’s compare the Chairs. Honestly, it’s impressive that a Fed Chair hasn’t missed a single FOMC meeting since Burns in the 1970s.

In Part II of this series, out early next week, I will show how vacancies and absences changed over time for both the Governors and the Reserve Bank Presidents. I’ll also show one example of what the data says about staff attendance.