Federal Reserve appoints Doug McMillon to new data task force under Chair Kevin Warsh

The Federal Reserve announced on July 9, 2026 that it is establishing five external task forces designed to overhaul how the central bank gathers and interprets economic information. One of those groups, focused specifically on improving data quality and timeliness, will be co-led by former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, and University of Chicago economist Kevin Murphy.

The move is the clearest signal yet that new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who took office on May 22, 2026, intends to make good on his promise of a “new chapter” at the institution.

Why McMillon, and why now

McMillon spent 11 years running Walmart, a company whose checkout lanes function as one of the most granular real-time economic sensors on the planet. When millions of transactions flow through a single retailer daily, you learn things about consumer behavior that quarterly government surveys miss entirely.

That is precisely the point. Warsh and his team are signaling discomfort with the Fed’s historical reliance on lagging government statistics, which often tell policymakers what the economy looked like two months ago rather than what it looks like today.

Raj Chetty brings a different but complementary lens. His work at Harvard focuses on economic mobility and granular income data, often drawing on administrative records and private datasets that illuminate inequality trends well before they surface in headline figures. Kevin Murphy at the University of Chicago adds deep structural economics expertise to the group.

Warsh’s broader redesign of the Fed

Warsh has made clear since taking office that he views inflation as the central challenge, and that the tools available to diagnose it need updating. The argument, broadly, is that traditional government statistical models were built for a different economy and struggle to capture the speed of modern pricing dynamics, supply chain shifts, and labor market changes.

McMillon’s Walmart data is particularly relevant to that inflation diagnosis. Retailers of Walmart’s scale observe price changes at the shelf level in near real-time, giving a more immediate read on consumer goods inflation than the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly CPI release can provide. The lag between economic reality and official measurement has been a recurring frustration for central bankers, and it contributed to the Fed’s delayed response to the post-pandemic inflation surge.

What this means for markets and policy

The more immediate watch item is how quickly these task forces produce actionable recommendations and whether those recommendations actually change the inputs the Federal Open Market Committee uses in its deliberations. Warsh’s credibility on the “new chapter” framing will hinge in part on whether McMillon, Chetty, and Murphy’s work visibly shapes FOMC discussions within the next 12 to 18 months.

Markets will be watching Chair Warsh’s press conferences and meeting minutes for any reference to alternative data sources. If Fed communications begin citing proprietary retail data or mobility metrics alongside traditional government releases, the task forces will have done their job.

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