That President Biden just interviewed Fed Governor Lael Brainard for promotion to chairman doesn’t worry the current chairman, Jerome Powell. Nor does the fact that inflation is edging closer to 6% than 5%. Nor that the central bank’s balance sheet is at 40% of gross domestic product. No, it turns out that Mr. Powell spent the morning opening a Fed conference on “gender and the economy.”

Call it the fourth mandate. The first three so-called mandates of the Fed — stable prices, full employment, and moderate stable long-term interest rates — were legislated by Congress. Say what you will, at least Congress holds the constitutional grant of between 99% and 101% of the monetary powers of the government. The mandate to address gender issues, in contrast, is a fiat mandate conjured, like the fiat dollar, out of thin air.

Not that we oppose addressing gender issues. We’re for inclusion and accommodation as inherent in the American spirit. We fail, though, to see the logic, or authority, in delegating gender to the Fed. Particularly when the Fed is failing at its statutory job. In the less than three years since Mr. Powell has been sworn as chairman, the value of the dollar has plunged a staggering 28% to under an 1,830th of an ounce of gold.

The accommodation we’d like to see at the Fed is the inclusion of dissenting, or classical, views of monetary policy. And a seat for those who are not necessarily convinced that it was a good thing to abandon even the indirect link to gold that was ordained in the Bretton Woods system or specie money itself. This is the point we kept making in respect of the nomination of Judy Shelton to be a governor of the Federal Reserve.

It’s shocking to us that no one at the Fed has been willing to address the question of whether Chairman Powell, in any way, lobbied the Senate against Ms. Shelton’s nomination. The question is out there because of a flurry of phone calls Mr. Powell’s own diary records that he made to various senators on the afternoon before and the day of the Senate’s vote on Ms. Shelton, a moderate advocate of sound money.

The question of possible lobbying by Mr. Powell — a matter, by his own admission, of ethical conduct — weighs heavily on these columns as Mr. Biden decides whom he’ll nominate for chairman in the new four-year term that begins early next year. We’ve heard Republican sages say that it would be better to have a wishy-washy figure like Mr. Powell than such a leftist economist as Lael Brainard. Then again also, too — why?

What kind of difference does it make in an age of fiat money? Either one of them would issue dollars that are not defined in law, nor redeemable in anything but other dollars of the same type. Neither one of them appears to be open to diversifying the views of the governors who oversee the central bank. The only men or women they seem prepared to welcome to the Fed board are those who favor irredeemable electronic paper ticket scrip.

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A governor of the Federal Reserve is title of Lael Brainard; her title was given incorrectly as vice chairman in the bulldog edition.