Who Sits at the Fed's Table? Part II

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

Kaleb Nygaard is back for the second part of his reporting on the changing nature of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decision-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In the first installment, he documented when the FOMC met, how often it met, and how participation around the table expanded as staff involvement steadily grew. His work shows that many features of today’s FOMC that feel fixed and natural are, in fact, the product of gradual institutional change. His analysis suggests that the Committee will likely continue to evolve going forward.

In this second installment, Kaleb turns from who was in the room to who wasn’t, examining how vacancies and absences have shaped the FOMC’s functioning across its history.

Meeting Attendance at the FOMC, Part II

By Kaleb Nygaard

In Part I in this series (linked here), I introduced a new qualitative data analyses 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. In today’s post I will show how vacancies and absences changed over time for both Governors and Reserve Bank presidents and end by highlighting one career staffer’s journey through the FOMC meetings over 20+ years.

In a previous data collection, I mapped out the family tree of every position on the FOMC. Below you can see each position’s attendance record. Two obvious findings here. First, (and we already knew this) but it’s interesting to see how much vacancy time the U.S. President and Senate have allowed for the Governors and how little time Reserve Banks go without a president. Second, Reserve Bank presidents have missed a lot of meetings. With the one major exception of the New York Fed President, who has been to more FOMC meetings than any other position on the committee except the seventh Governor seat, who have tied (down to the very meeting).

And if we switch from count to percentages, the numbers are even more readable. That first Governor seat has been vacant a solid fourth of the time since 1936. And although the Reserve Bank presidents have missed about the same number of meetings, they just stayed in their home town.

If you think this is all from the old days, you’d be correct for the absences, but not for the vacancies. We’ll get to that in a second. But first, I wanted to point out that the Boston Fed President literally didn’t attend a single FOMC meeting until 3.5 years after the committee began meeting. And the kicker is that this truant president was Roy A. Young, the former Governor (Chair before it was called that) of the Board in Washington. By the end of his time at Boston, Young had attended only 9 of 43 meetings, or 21%.

Now let’s see these attendance records over time. First up, here is a look at the data without separating by position. Here is the proof confirming your hunch that absences were a thing of the past.

And now let’s look at the data with the Governors and Reserve Bank presidents split out. It makes it very clear that most of the absences are from the Reserve Bank presidents and the vacancies are from the Governors. Though you can see the scandals (e.g. stock trading) that led to some vacancies in the 2010s and 2020s at the Reserve Banks.

The first meeting with the full 19 member FOMC was on September 28, 1950, fourteen and a half years after the first meeting. When you combine the truant Reserve Bank presidents and the vacant Governor seats, there really aren’t very many meetings with the committee at full 19 members. In fact, not a single year has had everyone present at every meeting.

For all meetings, only 17.5% have had the full committee present.

I’ve only done one sample analysis of the staff data, besides the aggregate counts. But here’s one final fun history you could do with the data: track a staffer’s history at the Fed. Here is my favorite former Board division director and current Yale professor, Bill English. First, a few headline stats and an image.

And here is his full history. You’ll notice that even though he was a division director, that isn’t listed here. This is an example of the weird governance overlaps of the various parts of the Fed system. During his time as Monetary Affairs Division Director at the Board of Governors he also served as Secretary of the FOMC. And since the FOMC and the Board of Governors are different entities within the Fed system, the Board position is listed only if the person doesn’t also hold a position within the FOMC itself. You can see a full list of all division directors, and the evolution of the directors themselves in a previous qualitative dataset of mine.

Another example of this, if you decide to peruse the meeting minutes yourself, you’ll see that the five voting Reserve Bank president member of the Committee are listed without titles, there are four Reserve Bank presidents that are listed as Alternate Members, and the remaining three are listed as simply presidents of their respective Reserve Banks.

There’s a lot to learn in the historical records of the Fed. Hope you’ve enjoyed this two-part chart journey through the attendance records of the FOMC as much as I enjoyed pulling out the data! Feel free to jump into it yourself and send me a note if you do anything interesting with it!