Over the past year, Jerome H. Powell has frequently said that the Federal Reserve faced “no risk-free paths” as it confronted a series of economic shocks that simultaneously lifted inflation while denting growth.

The same could be said for his momentous decision to stay on at the Fed as a governor after his term as Fed chair ends May 15.

In choosing to stay, Mr. Powell used the one tool of leverage he had left to push back on an administration that has aggressively attacked the central bank for its refusal to bend to the president’s demands for lower interest rates. Unless another Fed governor departs, President Trump will not have another vacancy to fill until Mr. Powell’s term ends in January 2028, stymieing the president’s plans to get more of his supporters on the powerful board of governors.

The move, which Mr. Powell announced on Wednesday at his final news conference after eight years as chair, drew an immediate rebuke from the administration. Mr. Trump quipped that Mr. Powell was staying because “he can’t get a job anywhere else — nobody wants him.” Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, called Mr. Powell’s decision a “violation of all Federal Reserve norms.”

On Thursday, Mr. Trump seemed to soften his approach, saying during remarks at the White House that he did not care if Mr. Powell stayed on and only was concerned about getting his Mr. Warsh into the top job.

The question now is whether Mr. Powell’s continued presence will further inflame tensions between the administration and the central bank, leading to even more intense attacks that will keep the institution on the defensive. Weeks before Mr. Powell announced his decision, Mr. Trump threatened to fire him if he did not resign after his term as chair ended.

“This could still go sideways, and if it does, some people will point to Powell staying as a provocation,” said Claudia Sahm, a former forecaster at the Fed who is now the chief economist at New Century Advisors. “Stay or go, there are risks on either side of this.”

Mr. Powell made clear on Wednesday that he wanted nothing more than to leave the Fed. Yet he said he had “no choice” but to stay and guard against further encroachments on the institution where he has served for nearly 14 years, first as a governor and then as chair. The last time a chair whose term had expired stayed on as a governor was in 1948.

“I’m literally staying because of the actions that have been taken,” Mr. Powell said when asked about whether his decision would be viewed as a political act. “I have long planned to be retiring.”

The decision had nothing to do with Kevin M. Warsh, Mr. Trump’s pick to replace him as chair, Mr. Powell stressed on Wednesday.

He said he took Mr. Warsh at his word that he would stand up to political pressure from the president. Mr. Powell also vowed to keep a “low profile as a governor,” despite retaining a vote on decisions around rates and other policies.

William Dudley, who previously was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said he expected Mr. Powell to stay relatively quiet and embrace a “one man, one vote” approach.

Mr. Powell spent much of his news conference explaining that his decision to stay rested on a belief that the central bank’s independence was fundamentally “at risk” amid a litany of legal threats that were far from over.

“These legal actions by the administration are unprecedented in our 113-year history, and there are ongoing threats of additional such actions,” he said. “I worry that these attacks are battering the institution and putting at risk the thing that really matters to the public, which is the ability to conduct monetary policy without taking into consideration political factors.”

Top of mind for Mr. Powell is a criminal investigation that the Justice Department began against the Fed regarding renovations to its headquarters in Washington and whether he lied to Congress about the plans. Federal prosecutors dropped the inquiry on Friday, but maintained that they could reopen it at any point. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said on Thursday that there was “no question” the Justice Department would appeal a federal judge’s recent ruling that quashed subpoenas issued to the central bank. For now, the Fed’s inspector general is looking into the renovation, an inquest that Mr. Powell requested in July.

“You’ve got billions of dollars in cost overruns on a very small project,” she said, adding that prosecutors would await the “decision” by the Fed’s internal watchdog and “based upon that decision we will then decide what we are going to do.”

Mr. Powell has long stipulated that he would not leave the Fed until the Justice Department’s investigation was “well and truly over, with finality and transparency.” But a mounting concern is whether Mr. Trump will now use the allegations leveled in the investigation to try to fire Mr. Powell, having already accused him of “incompetence” and questioned whether he committed fraud.

“There’s definitely a cost-benefit analysis one would think Powell engaged in, and the cost of staying is that it greatly increases the likelihood that there will be a for-cause removal case against him involving the renovations, which would be a novel litigation,” said Lev Menand, an associate professor at Columbia Law School.

A president can remove a Fed official only for cause, which legal experts interpret to mean gross misconduct or a dereliction of duty. The issue is being debated by the Supreme Court after the president’s attempt to fire Lisa D. Cook, a governor, in August.

Joseph Gagnon, a former senior member of the Fed staff who is now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said it was crucial for Ms. Cook to win that case. “If they let Trump fire governors at will, then there’s no more independent monetary policy,” he said.

If Mr. Trump or the Justice Department pursues any additional legal actions, “being on the inside is always better than being on the outside,” Scott Alvarez, who previously served as the Fed’s general counsel, said of Mr. Powell’s decision to stay.

Graham Steele, a longtime financial regulation lawyer and a former Treasury Department official, noted that there would be “strategic” advantages in doing so, such as “physical proximity, access to information and the institutional halo effect that come from being a sitting governor.”

For the time being, Mr. Powell’s continued presence at an institution that has gone through so much tumult in the past year and is now on the cusp of a major leadership transition is “symbolically really important,” said Jon Faust, a fellow at the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior adviser to the outgoing chair.

What perhaps will matter even more is when Mr. Powell decides to leave, Ms. Sahm said.

“It will mean so much when he says, ‘I’m ready to retire,’ because that will be a sign from someone who cares deeply about the institution that it’s going to be OK.”

— Tony Romm contributed reporting.

The Agriculture Department projected last July that farmers would harvest 86.8 million acres of corn in autumn. The projection was repeatedly revised upward until, in January, the department found 1.3 million more acres of corn — an area larger than Delaware — and concluded that the final amount harvested was 91.3 million acres.

“It was a miss. No other way to call it,” said Seth Meyer, who served as the department’s chief economist until leaving in December.

The 5 percent undercount may seem small, but it was the department’s worst projection in recent memory. It came as the Trump administration was cutting staff at the Agriculture Department and as President Trump’s trade war raised prices for equipment and hurt exports.

Some people in agriculture have become increasingly worried about the reliability of department data. That skepticism could lead to a breakdown of the historically close relationship between the department and farmers it serves, they said.

“U.S.D.A. always had a great relationship with its farmers,” said Mr. Meyer, who now leads the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “That seems to have weakened.”

The Agriculture Department publishes thousands of reports annually on everything from county-level sorghum planting to China’s hardwood market. But its estimates of crop size are some of the most closely read reports. Traders use information from the reports to immediately buy and sell commodities, affecting the prices that farmers receive for their crops. Farmers use the information to make decisions about how and when to try to sell their crop for the most money.

Department officials haven’t offered an official explanation for the miss, but many outside it point to staffing cuts and lower survey response rates.

The Agriculture Department lost 23,000 employees in 2025, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs across the federal government. The National Agricultural Statistics Service, which produces crop reports, was one of the hardest-hit divisions; it lost 34 percent of its staff, going to about 500 employees from around 800.

The corn miss prompted Farm Journal, an agricultural publication, to ask respondents to its monthly survey whether they remained confident in department data. Most of the farmers, ranchers and economists polled responded “no.”

“People trade the reports whether the reports are true or not,” said Shay Foulk, who farms 1,500 acres and runs a seed business near Peoria, Ill. Since farmers are trading in commodity markets against sophisticated managed funds and trading algorithms, he said, “the farmer just feels they are at a disadvantage if those numbers are inaccurate.”

For years, the department has struggled with fewer farmers returning its surveys, one of the key data sources for crop production reports. The response rate for recent surveys was around 40 percent, according to the department, down from around 60 percent a decade ago.

“When farmers lose trust in the agency, they don’t want to participate as much, and so there is a direct line between low staff and low participation and incorrect data,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, in an interview.

In March, Democrats on the Agriculture Committee wrote a letter to Scott Hutchins, the under secretary for research, education and economics at the Agriculture Department, concerned about the reliability of the department’s data. They also said the department’s proposed relocation of employees from Washington to hubs around the country “threatens to worsen the loss of key institutional knowledge and staff capacity.”

Mr. Hutchins, who was appointed by Mr. Trump last year, said in an interview that farmers still trusted the agency but had “well-founded frustrations” with the corn misestimate.

Asked whether losing employees had anything to do with the miss, he said, “Absolutely, unequivocally no.” Mr. Hutchins added that the department’s ability to develop new efficiencies had been “enhanced tremendously” by the departures, and that it was using more remote sensing abilities and artificial intelligence to collect data.

“I don’t understand what all of the additional staff might’ve been doing for us to still produce the same outcome with the current staff that we have,” he said.

Mr. Hutchins did say he was worried about the department’s entering a data doom loop if response rates continued to fall. “It is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “The fewer surveys we have, the larger the standard error we will have in estimates.”

The corn miss was a major topic of conversation last week at the semiannual Agriculture Department data users’ meeting, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It is normally a low-key event attended by departmental economists, academics, agricultural company representatives and others, where heads of different divisions preview new data products and answer esoteric methodology questions. But this time, there was a heavy focus on heightening transparency and increasing survey response rates.

Lance Honig, the acting director of the department’s statistics division, suggested that 2025 was an anomaly. Because of the large amount of corn planted and record yields, the normal statistical models were off.

“I would suggest that the 2025 crop season was a bit different than anything we had seen in, oh, I don’t know, what would that be — 80, 90 years,” Mr. Honig said.

The Agriculture Department recently put out a request for information for commentary and ideas about its data products. It is also planning to increase the number of farmers surveyed for its acreage reports, pending approval from the Office of Management and Budget for the higher cost to send out more surveys.

One meeting attendee, Bill Lapp, a food industry consultant, suggested that surveys be made mandatory for those receiving money from the government’s bailout package for farmers. “For $12 billion, can’t you get them to fill out a damn postcard a couple of times a year?” he asked in a question-and-answer session.

Farmers have a deep and direct relationship with the federal government, which sustains much of their business. Farmers participate in crop insurance and conservation programs, apply for grants and receive disaster assistance and ad hoc payments. The Agriculture Department projects that government payments will account for 29 percent of farm income this year.

These programs run on data obtained from farmers. They must certify the number of acres they plant with the Farm Service Agency in order to participate in income support programs. To get crop insurance, farmers must give their financial information to the Risk Management Agency. So when they are also mailed surveys asking detailed questions about their crops, some farmers get annoyed, because they believe the department has, or should have, the data.

Mr. Foulk, the Illinois farmer, said farmers were in part disgruntled with the federal government because of their declining influence. On tariffs, biofuels policy and the farm bill, farmers haven’t gotten what they wanted lately.

“We had the privilege of having this outsized voice, and now we’re not as loud,” he said.

Farmers are unlikely to stop participating in Agriculture Department programs that directly benefit them, no matter how they feel, said Mr. Meyer, the former agency economist. But their very viability is underpinned by data and analysis.

“Supporting data collection has historically and continues to support the things that directly impact them,” he said.