This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Al Landon is kind of like the Merrick Garland of the Federal Reserve.

President Barack Obama named Landon, of Park City, as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in January 2015, but as with Garland — Obama's pick for the Supreme Court vacancy — the Senate has failed to act on Landon's nomination that will expire at the start of the new Congress.

"There have been a whole number of executive branch nominees who have just been hanging fire for a long time," says Carl Tobias, a Williams Chairman of Law at the University of Richmond who tracks judicial and executive nominations. "It's pretty disappointing. It's an important position in the Fed."

Landon, an adjunct professor at the University of Utah and member of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Board, would have served a term of 14 years on the governing body of the Federal Reserve, the nation's central banking system, had he been confirmed. Instead, the Senate failed to hold a vote or even a hearing on Landon's nomination or that of Kathryn Dominguez, an economics professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

That has left two vacancies on the seven-member board even as monetary policy takes on a larger role in an economy that has seen record-breaking financial markets and the lowest unemployment rate in nine years.

Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that the short-handed Fed is dangerously close to losing its control of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates and decides on actions affecting America's working class. One resignation from the Fed board now would put regional Federal Reserve governors in the majority of that committee.

"One can debate whether this would be a good thing or not, but the system was not designed expecting such a scenario," the Bipartisan Policy Committee's Justin Schardin and Aaron Klein said in a blog post a year ago in pushing for Senate action on the nominees.

The Bipartisan Policy Committee's nominations tracker showed that it took Obama 300 days to nominate Landon and 429 to name Dominguez, but Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby has declined to bring either up for a hearing on their qualifications.

Landon is reportedly a close friend of Obama's and spoke at the funeral of the president's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, reading a letter from Obama and his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng about Dunham, who died the Sunday before Obama's 2008 election.

Landon is a partner in Community BanCapital and served as chairman and chief executive officer of the Bank of Hawaii Corporation from 2004 to 2010. He previously served as chief financial officer of First American Corp. and First American National Bank.

Since the Senate has failed to act, the Federal Reserve board spots will remain open for incoming President Donald Trump to nominate someone new.