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.
