A major feature in the Federal Reserve under the second Donald Trump presidency is the spike in the number of dissent votes. That is unusual because Jerome Powell had a streak of unanimous votes that ran from July 2022 to September 2024.
But at his last FOMC meeting as the Fed chair, a total of four officials voted no—Governor Stephen Miran dissented in favor of a 25-basis-point cut, while Reserve Bank Presidents Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari, and Lorie Logan dissented because they opposed the inclusion of an easing bias in the statement.
What if I tell you the Fed officials actually disagreed more at times during the zero-against vote period than in the last meeting? This is what the FOMC Minutes-based Hidden Dissent Index indicates.
The FOMC Hidden Dissent Index, an indicator developed by Kwok Ping Tsang of Virginia Tech and Zichao Yang of Wenlan School of Business, measures the level of hidden dissent among Federal Open Market Committee members at each meeting, based on the words used in the meeting record rather than the recorded vote. The graph above shows the version computed from the FOMC meeting minutes.
Zooming in on the period after 2020, we can see the index peaked at the November 2022 meeting, when it breached the 0.28 level (the higher the reading, the more “hidden dissent”); the reading at the four-dissent April 2026 meeting: 0.23.
Actually, we can see that the index was elevated during the second half of 2022. Why?
Well, one major factor to consider is that the period was right in the middle of the Fed’s post-Covid rate hike cycle.
During that period, while all FOMC members knew the interest rate should go up further, they started to think about how fast and how much more they should hike— and that generated divergence in their views.
The November 2022 meeting was a particularly contentious one in the sense that the minutes described four distinct positions on the question of when to slow the pace of hikes.
- “A number of participants” saw room to slow.
- “A substantial majority” thought slowing would “likely soon be appropriate.”
- “A few” wanted to slow for financial-stability reasons.
- “A few other participants” wanted to wait until the stance was “more clearly in restrictive territory” first.
A simpler indicator is that there were 18 paragraphs in the “Participants’ Views on Current Conditions and the Economic Outlook” section of the Nov 2022 minutes; in the April 2026 minutes, there were “only” 12 paragraphs; and the average across all the meetings in between is 12.6 paragraphs. The debate was heated during the Nov 2022 meeting, even though they eventually voted unanimously.
Comparatively, the current FOMC can be described as uniformly puzzled by the uncertainties posed by several Trump policies—the labor market is in a “curious balance” due to the immigration crackdown, goods inflation has been pushed up by the new tariff regime, and the real economy has been hit by a fresh round of supply shocks from “the conflict in the Middle East” and “the increase in global energy prices.”
They may have different views about the future direction of the dual mandates, with some putting more weight on the upside inflation risk than others. But most of them are not confident about what will happen next — who can say when the war will end? So, even if they have diverging views, they agree on the “wait-and-see approach” as the preferred default.
And yet — unlike the unanimous Powell-era meetings of 2022 to 2024 — four of them still chose to put their names on the record. That’s the new pattern worth watching. The post-Covid hiking cycle delivered the kind of “vigorous family fight” inside the FOMC that new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has said he is looking for. But now the curious point is why the FOMC members are more open to voting against the consensus, even when they agree with the policy decision.
What drives this desire to be heard? Is it a reaction to the White House’s legal and verbal attacks on the US central bank? More importantly, will this trend continue in the Warsh era? This is what I hope the Hidden Dissent Index can help us explore.
