Stephen Moore, President Donald Trump’s pick for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, owes $75,000 in taxes and penalties to Uncle Sam.
A circuit court filing in Maryland shows the US government won a judgment against Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser and now a distinguished fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, for a federal tax lien valued at $75,328.80. The January 2018 filing says it was for unpaid taxes, penalties, interest and other costs in 2014.
Moore referred questions about the tax debt to his wife, Anne Carey, while noting the couple is owed roughly $30,000 from the Internal Revenue Service. CNN has reached out to Carey for further details.
Matthew Leas, a spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service, the country’s federal tax collector, declined to comment specifying federal privacy and disclosure laws prohibit the agency from discussing any individual case. A White House spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Guardian first reported on Moore’s tax lien.
On Friday, Trump announced plans to nominate Moore for a sixth seat on the Fed Board. The White House has yet to officially submit his name to the Senate, where he is subject to confirmation.
Trump’s choice of Moore has already raised eyebrows given his often colorful views of the Fed and his close relationship with the President, who has broken with precedent and directly criticized the Fed’s recent interest rate hikes.
“Moore is wholly unfit to serve in the office to which he is being nominated,” Bradford Delong, an economic historian and former deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department under the Clinton administration, wrote in an op-ed published by MarketWatch. “He has absolutely no business overseeing US monetary policy. The same is true of any president who would appoint him and any senator who would vote to confirm him.”
In December, Moore blasted Fed chairman Jerome Powell and other members of the board for raising rates at the end of last year, saying they “should be thrown out for economic malpractice” and going so far as to suggest Powell – who was appointed by Trump – should resign from the role.
Moore told Bloomberg on Friday that his comment was most likely made “in anger” and that he would be willing to work with and learn from his colleagues on the board. But he said he still maintained his negative view of the Fed’s December rate hike, calling it “a very substantial mistake.”
“Everyone would now acknowledge that what they did in December with the rate increase – it was a very substantial mistake,” said Moore.
The Fed has a long-standing track record of remaining independent of political intrusions. More recently, Powell and other members of the Fed have refrained from addressing political attacks by Trump, who called his Fed chairman “crazy” and “loco” for raising rates four times in 2018. Instead, Powell has often side-stepped the issue in order to preserve the Fed’s independence and reinforce the message that policymakers are working in the best interests of the country.
Members of the seven-member panel at the Fed are typically economists, financial industry executives and bank regulators. Moore is a former Wall Street Journal editorial board member and anti-tax activist.
He was also an analyst for CNN, though a spokesman said last week that relationship had been terminated.
