A second Trump administration might be very different from the first, and that includes how the president treats the Fed. Donald Trump complained a lot about the U.S. Federal Reserve when he was president, jawboning for lower interest rates and questioning its competence. Yet at the end of the day the Fed retained its independence and credibility. Now all that is in danger.

Trump advisers have been drafting plans to limit significantly the operating autonomy of the Fed. The Trump campaign has disavowed these plans, but the general ideas have been spreading in Republican circles, as evidenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report. Trump himself has called for a weaker dollar policy, which could not be carried out without some degree of Fed cooperation. As a former businessman and real-estate developer, Trump seems to care most about interest rates, banking and currencies.

One concrete proposal reported in the Wall Street Journal would require the Fed to informally consult with the president on decisions concerning interest rates and other major aspects of monetary policy. That would make it harder for the central bank to commit to a stated policy of disinflation, since the ongoing influence of the president would be a wild card in the decision. Presidents would likely give more consideration to their own reelection prospects than to the advice of the Fed staff. Further confusion would result from the reality that the responsibility of the president in these matters simply would not be clear.

It’s important not to be naïve: Regardless of who is in the White House, the Fed already cares what the president and Congress think, as its future independence is never guaranteed. Still, explicit consultation would undercut the coherence of the decision-making process within the Fed itself and send a negative signal to investors. There is no upside from this approach.

It’s also true that there are countries where the government, not the central bank, steers monetary policy. In New Zealand, the government establishes an inflation target and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is expected to meet it or explain why it failed. This way the legislature (which is closely allied with the executive branch, unlike in the U.S.) has to take responsibility for the inflation rate. Although this method has worked for New Zealand, it is impracticable for the U.S., due to the extreme separation of powers in the U.S. government. The new Republican proposals, in contrast to the Kiwi emphasis on clear lines of governance, seek behind-the-scenes influence without accountability for the executive branch.

If Trump wins, America’s best hope is that the administration itself reconsiders these plans and rejects them. (Congress could also force him to reconsider his Fed choices, as it did in his first term.) One reason the current semi-independent Fed is useful is that it allows the president — and, more important, Congress — to shift blame for tough monetary-policy decisions. House members, who face reelection every two years, benefit from this arrangement most of all. So if a Trump election is accompanied by a Republican House, a plausible but by no means certain outcome, the Republican Party itself may not want to restrict Fed independence. The whipping boy would be gone.

Another of the new proposals would subject the Fed to the executive-branch review process, much as other agencies must undergo, ostensibly to ensure that “the president’s policies and priorities are reflected in agency rules.” Does anyone think that today’s executive branch, operating from a great distance, would improve the Fed’s decisions on bank supervision? Of course if the president has ideas to improve bank supervision, he is free to introduce new legislation before Congress toward that end.

As it now stands, the Fed — because of its relative statutory and de facto independence — has a reputation for attracting superior talent, relative to many other parts of the federal government. Making it just another executive-branch agency would jeopardize that.

Conservatives are concerned, often justifiably, that many federal agencies are out of control, overregulating and exercising regulatory powers that Congress never truly delegated. But this argument does not apply to the Fed. To whatever extent banking may be overregulated, the problem is too many distinct regulators at multiple levels of government — not an excessively interventionist central bank.

And then there is perhaps the most important truth of all. The executive branch — subject to the caprice of Congress, of course — already has at its disposal a fairly direct means of restoring greater monetary and financial stability to the U.S.: the federal budget. If it were more fiscally responsible, then the Fed’s job would be much easier.

At the very least, the executive branch could draw up such a budget and fight for it. If the president — whether it’s Trump or not — did that, it would be proof that he is serious about monetary stability. Otherwise, it’s safe to assume that any plans for the Fed, however implausible, amount to just another clumsy power grab.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

Related Articles

David French: Colleges have gone off the deep end. This is the way back.

Stephen L. Carter: Will Columbia protesters achieve their goals?

Thomas Friedman: Israel has a choice: Rafah or Riyadh

Bruce Yandle: Halt, they cried! But the inflation tide continues

Lisa Jarvis: Idaho’s abortion ban is based on legal delusion and medical myth

Recently, while cleaning out my basement, I came across a picture of myself from 1983. The photo was taken at my Reform Movement Jewish summer camp, located on several acres of bucolic rolling hills along a clear lake in southeastern Wisconsin. That summer was easily one of the best and most formative of my childhood. I was 15.

But seeing the photograph again was unexpectedly jarring. The picture was our official group portrait: roughly 50 young teenagers of varying heights, some piled around a wooden tower, a sort of mini-Midwestern ziggurat. In the center of the tower hung an Israeli flag, taller than any of us. The flag is the only one in the picture and such a vivid reminder of the fact that the nation of Israel was front and center in our Jewishness.

The following summer, I traveled to Israel for two months. This, too, was quite a formative experience. My group consisted of 20 Jewish teenagers from the Chicago area and 20 Israeli teenagers from Jerusalem. I also found those photos during my basement cleaning: of us smiling and laughing as we toured Arab villages in Gaza; of me climbing around an abandoned Syrian bunker in the Golan Heights; of our tired faces after two exhausting days of mock basic training at the Galilee’s Tzalmon Gadna, an Israeli military training camp for youth. We learned that after years of expulsion and oppression, Jews were finally in charge of these lands. They were ours to celebrate and explore.

The concept of Israel as a nation-state was so deeply ingrained in my Jewish education and imagination that, for decades, it seldom occurred to me to ever question it. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, my formal Jewish education essentially centered on two themes: persecution and Israel. The themes were intertwined, since Jews had been persecuted throughout the ages and therefore deserved a homeland, and that homeland was Israel. The Jewish state, born out of a grave injustice — the Holocaust — was the rightful result of generations of oppression.

In religious school, I learned that all of the countries surrounding Israel were Israel’s enemy, and that was because of antisemitism — never mind that the people in the surrounding countries were also Semites, an antiquated term for speakers of Semitic languages, who are mostly Arab. I learned that Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian (and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian) people were terrorists, who wanted nothing more than to abolish Israel simply because they hated Jews.

Another commonly accepted account was that Israel was a “tiny” piece of land that Jews were historically entitled to, that the land was there just waiting for us to return to it. That story was part biblical promise and part political solution. Nobody ever explicitly said it was uninhabited, but as a young child that is how it was crafted for me to picture it. It was a place where Holocaust refugees were entitled to be able to go — a place where they could collectively defend themselves against the uniquely abhorrent evils of antisemitism.

Of all the values I learned as a child, one of the strongest was to question things. But the themes of persecution and the need for a Jewish homeland were deeply embedded in me. These themes allowed me to dismiss any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, which is what my community had long modeled for me. Particularly on the point of Israeli Zionism, a questioning Jew was a self-hating Jew. It never quite made sense to me, but I knew a red line when I saw one, and I dared not cross it.

I am ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until quite recently, in the weeks after Oct. 7, that I began to understand that there was something deeply wrong with my understanding of how and why Israel became a state. I liken it to a crisis of faith. It took Hamas’ horrifying attack for me to open my mind to the possibility that there was another narrative to Israel’s founding.

During this questioning period, my son recommended I read the work of Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, has deep familial Palestinian roots. Among the many things I learned from his writing, what really stands out was that long before Israel’s founding in 1948, there was an indigenous population in the area whose territory came under British control after World War I. From that point onward, a systematic dismantling of Palestinian society began as Zionism gained ground, with wave after wave of Jewish immigration to the land.

By the end of 1948, nearly 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled and displaced, much the same way that Jews have historically been expelled and displaced for millennia. People were forced from their homes so that Jews could come in and settle. That’s the historical reality of the Nakba — an Arabic word often translated as “catastrophe,” and one I’d never heard until last year, even though I am 56 years old. How is it possible that none of my Jewish educators ever mentioned this history of dispossession?

I can and do blame myself for not knowing or understanding the Palestinian people’s reality until 40 years after my formal Jewish education ended. I have spent my whole life aghast at the idea that people would be expelled from their homes, their countries, simply because of who they were, where they were born, because of a religion or creed or race. And yet, it had happened at the hands of my own people.

The context and circumstances of how Israel became a state bear many painful but crucial truths that my Jewish education too conveniently elided. Jews — themselves persecuted through the ages simply for being Jewish — displaced an entire people, simply for not being Jewish. Hamas’ violent uprising of Oct. 7 and the wider Palestinian resistance need to be understood from that starting point.

The great scholar and sage Hillel the Elder once said that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: This is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” This basic moral insight, sometimes called the Golden Rule, is found in nearly every world religion. And yet, many in the Jewish community are supportive of Israel’s assault on Gaza and have rationalized it as legitimate self-defense. How? How can my fellow Jews go on about how Israel has a right to defend itself, as if one atrocity plus another atrocity isn’t doubly morally reprehensible?

My own life suggests a possible answer: the intentional and systematic miseducation of Jews in America. For anyone who has been as miseducated as I have been, maybe it’s time for you to start questioning, as Judaism teaches us so well. You might start with the institutions responsible for shaping the messages our community learns. Or you might start, as I did, in the basement.

Either way, it’s time to start.

Jill Gurvey is a health policy analyst in Philadelphia. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

Related Articles

David French: Colleges have gone off the deep end. This is the way back.

Stephen L. Carter: Will Columbia protesters achieve their goals?

Thomas Friedman: Israel has a choice: Rafah or Riyadh

Bruce Yandle: Halt, they cried! But the inflation tide continues

Lisa Jarvis: Idaho’s abortion ban is based on legal delusion and medical myth