by Amara Omeokwe and Billy House
Yahoo! Finance
(Bloomberg) — Congressional Republicans are ramping up scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, just as the central bank confronts stubborn inflation and broader questions about its role as a bank regulator.
The opening act in the new effort will come Tuesday at the first hearing of a freshly formed House task force that will home in on the Fed. It falls the same day President Donald Trump will address Congress amid a barrage of directives expanding his authority over independent government agencies.
“We needed a particular special focus in using the task force route to look at the Federal Reserve system, literally from the charter in 1913 to present,” said Frank Lucas, an Oklahoma Republican who will chair the new panel examining the central bank’s conduct of monetary policy and bank regulation.