Christopher Phelan Nominated to be Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
The University of Minnesota Department of Economics announces that Professor Christopher Phelan has been nominated to serve as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the Trump administration and will serve subject to Senate confirmation.
Professor Phelan is a leading scholar in macroeconomic theory, monetary economics, government reputation, and economic policy. He has published extensively in the profession’s most prestigious journals, including Econometrica, and has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a distinguished honor in the field.
Professor Phelan has been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota since 2007 and served as Department Chair from 2012 to 2021. He was previously a full-time economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and continued as a consultant to its Research Department through May 2026. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1990, and has held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University.
Professor Phelan’s nomination continues a longstanding University of Minnesota tradition—rooted in its land-grant mission—of bringing rigorous economic scholarship to bear on public policy. In serving as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, he follows a path similar to that of Walter Heller, also a former Minnesota Economics Department Chair, who went on to serve as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, helping to define the modern role of economic policy advising. This tradition remains central to Minnesota Economics and is reflected in the work of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, which advances the application of economic research to public policy challenges.
We congratulate Professor Phelan on this nomination and are proud that his expertise is poised to serve our nation in addressing critical economic challenges.
