‘I am not a huge fan of the Fed . . . They have existed with this notion that they have this priestly ability to make decisions. And in fact, I don’t actually think they’re that good at it.’

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If the liberals are dismayed by Elon Musk’s campaign to shake up the bureaucracy, what will they make of Russell Vought? He just returned as President Trump’s head of Office of Management and Budget, where he’d served in Mr. Trump’s first term, with a mandate to scale back the federal Leviathan. Lawrence Kudlow calls Mr. Vought’s plans “DOGE — on steroids.” Mr. Vought’s remarks above suggest he has his eye on the Federal Reserve.

Good for him. Mr. Vought’s ambitions are marked by the Financial Times, which reckons that if Mr. Musk “is on the front lines” of efforts to “overhaul and cleanse the administrative state,” then Mr. Vought is “the commander of the operation.” The OMB chief frames his task in moral terms — plus he grasps the constitutional idea of the unitary executive — that the full executive power of the United States is vested in the President alone.

On that head, America’s central bank appears to loom large in Mr. Vought’s imagination, if his conversation the other day with Tucker Carlson is any guide. Of the Fed, Mr. Vought explained, “I can’t look at the Constitution and the massive decades-long decisions that they have made” and “see that that is a place where there deserves to be an exception” to the constitutional bar on “independent” federal agencies.

Even worse, Mr. Vought suggests, the Fed’s independence hasn’t led to wise policy. “They’re wrong and they’ve been wrong for decades,” despite the aforementioned “notion that they have this priestly ability to make decisions.” To the contrary, Mr. Vought contends that “people like President Trump are, in fact, better at it. And there’s no reason,” he adds, that the Fed “should be exempt from the normal democratic process.”

Mr. Vought concedes that “If Congress wants to come along and pass rules that say, you know, this is how we want the money supply to go,” then “that is in their purview.” That’s a reminder that the Framers assigned to the legislature — the most political branch — all of the monetary powers in the Constitution. It was the misjudgment of Congress in 1913 to delegate to the Fed those monetary powers, with unanticipated or wanted  consequences. 

Far from proving reliable stewards of the dollar, which, when the Fed was created, had a value a 20.67th of an ounce of gold, the central bank has presided over an astonishing debasement of America’s currency. In trading today the dollar’s value plunged below a 2,900th of an ounce of gold — marking another new low for the greenback. So how can anyone say the Fed’s independence has helped maintain the dollar’s value?

By underscoring the Fed’s lack of accountability, Mr. Vought skewers the bank’s pretensions to be above the fray. “No, you’re not some priestly role,” he said. “You are politicians yourselves. You just don’t have to face voters.” We are of the view that the Fed’s failure to protect the dollar’s value is a symptom of the era of fiat money, which, along with a debasement of the currency, has enabled an enormous inflation of assets — and accumulation of debt.

Tackling that problem will require monetary reform — and a close look at the Fed itself. “You are going to be called crazy,” Senator Kennedy of Louisiana told Mr. Vought at his confirmation hearing, for “challenging the status quo.” In a nod, no doubt, to the deluge of debt that threatens America’s prosperity and global standing, the solon added: “Many people also called Noah crazy, then the rains came, and all the fact-checkers died. You have to persevere.”