The Powell Affair and the Limits of The Fed’s Immunity

“No one — certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve — is above the law..”

By Alexander W. Salter, AIER’s The Daily Economy

The latest clash between President Trump, Federal Reserve Chair Powell, and the Department of Justice has been widely portrayed as a constitutional crisis for central bank independence. The DOJ is investigating whether Powell made false or misleading statements to Congress regarding the scope and cost of the Federal Reserve’s m ulti-billion-dollar headquarters renovation. Powell denies wrongdoing and casts the inquiry as political pressure on monetary policy. Trump denies direct involvement, but has renewed his longstanding attacks on Powell’s performance as Fed chair. The affair has metastasized into a broader fight over law, accountability, and the nature of modern central banking.

Financial markets have responded nervously. Commentators warn of capital flight, politicized interest-rate decisions, and the erosion of US monetary credibility. Former Fed officials and many academic economists have rushed to Powell’s defense, framing the investigation itself as the real scandal. International central bankers have issued statements of solidarity. The elite consensus is clear: even asking whether the Fed chair broke the law risks catastrophic damage to institutional independence.

But this framing obscures the main issue. It matters greatly whether Powell lied to Congress. Legislative oversight is not a nuisance; it is the constitutional mechanism by which unelected officials remain accountable to the public. If Powell’s testimony was accurate, the investigation should end quickly and publicly. If it was not, that fact cannot be waved away by invoking the supposed sanctity of central banking. Accountability is not optional simply because the Fed is prestigious.

This matters even more given the Fed’s recent record. Under Powell’s leadership, the United States experienced the highest inflation in forty years — a clear failure of the Fed’s price-stability mandate. At the same time, the institution increasingly drifted into areas far beyond monetary policy, such as explicitly targeting racial unemployment gaps and inserting itself into climate policy debates. None of this appears in the Federal Reserve Act. Congress did not authorize a social engineer with a printing press. Yet the Fed has behaved as if its independence grants it a limitless commission.

That brings us to the deeper issue: what does “central bank independence” actually mean? In practice, it has come to mean governance by unaccountable technocrats — officials who exercise vast discretionary power over money and credit while being insulated from democratic control. This is difficult to reconcile with self-government under the rule of law. Independence from day-to-day political pressure may be defensible. Independence from law, oversight, and consequence is not.

Defenders of the status quo argue that independence delivers superior economic outcomes. But the latest evidence fails to corroborate that. Even if this claim were empirically correct, it would not settle the matter. No technocratic efficiency argument can override constitutional structure. Agencies do not derive legitimacy from good results but from lawful authority. If the benefits of independence require shielding officials from legal accountability, then the price is too high.

None of this implies that Donald Trump is a disinterested defender of constitutional order. He plainly has political motives, and his history of browbeating the Fed is well known. Lawfare—the subordination of the state’s institutions of justice to personal ambition—is always improper in a free society.

But Powell’s culpability does not depend on the president’s motivations. Trump is the head of the executive branch, and the federal bureaucracy is not a sovereign entity unto itself. A system that delegitimizes investigations whenever they inconvenience elite institutions puts bureaucratic immunity above the rule of law.

More broadly, the idea that central banking can ever be apolitical is a complete fiction. Government intervention in money and credit necessarily allocates gains and losses based on political criteria. Interest rates, asset prices, and credit availability are inherently political when the political process decides to create and maintain a central bank. The real choice is not between politics and technocracy, but between democratic accountability and no accountability at all. If democratic oversight proves messy or destabilizing, that should prompt a more fundamental question: why grant the government such sweeping control over money in the first place?

Powell therefore does not deserve an automatic pass. “Independence” is not a constitutional exemption. If a public official — any public official — lies to Congress, there should be consequences. If he did not, the investigation should end and the facts should be made clear. Either outcome would strengthen, not weaken, the rule of law.

“No one — certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve — is above the law,” a central banker once said. That truism must be our lodestar going forward. However the investigation plays out, it’s time to discard the servile notion that the Fed is answerable only to itself.

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