WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to give Congress greater scrutiny over the monetary policy decisions of the Federal Reserve, approving legislation sponsored by longtime Fed nemesis Rep. Ron Paul.
The 76-year-old Texas Republican, who is retiring at the end of this session, has made a career of trying to do away with the Fed, which he blames for the growth of government and the rising federal deficit. Failing to accomplish that, he has pushed to make the independent central bank’s operations more transparent.
“I know when people talk about independence and having this privacy of the central bank, it means they want secrecy, and secrecy is not good,” Paul said.
“Congress has rightly insulated the Fed from short-term political pressures,” Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House’s second-ranked Democrat, said in opposing the legislation. “This bill increases the likelihood that the Fed will make decisions based on political rather than economic considerations, and that is not a recipe for sound monetary policy.”
The legislation, which passed 327-98, would require the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to carry out comprehensive audits of the Fed’s Board of Governors and 12 regional banks.
The Fed is subject to annual financial statement audits, and the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, does have provisions, backed by Paul, for auditing certain Fed activities. But the new legislation goes further in requiring inspections of the bank’s monetary policy decision-making, including its agreements with foreign central banks and Foreign Open Market Committee directives.
As of July 18, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at $2.86 trillion.
