“Maybe I should go to the Fed,” President Donald Trump commented in June, just before the Federal Reserve’s last policy meeting.

“Am I allowed to appoint myself? I’d do a much better job than these people.”

The seemingly offhand remark, tossed out to reporters after Trump spent months bashing the decisions of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, set off a predictable media explosion.

But it sketched out a serious idea: Trump has an opportunity to challenge Washington’s “business as usual” approach to financial policy — and bring common sense to federal economic management.

After all, the president is ultimately responsible for the nation’s economic success. And Trump, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday, “is probably the most economically sophisticated president we’ve had in 100 years, maybe ever.” 

Right now, America’s two most powerful economic engines — fiscal and monetary policy — run in separate lanes with no traffic signals.

Fiscal policy, controlled by the Treasury and Congress, focuses on taxes, spending and government borrowing.

Monetary policy, controlled by the Federal Reserve and its Federal Open Market Committee, manages interest rates and the money supply.

The Treasury writes the checks. The Fed sets the cost of money. But they operate with little coordination.

For the last half-century, the Fed has immersed itself in an insular culture, now bordering on paranoia, intent on resisting White House influence.

The trauma stems from 1971, when Fed Chair Arthur Burns appeared to cave to White House pressure and kept interest rates low ahead of Richard Nixon’s re-election. Inflation exploded for the next decade. 

“Fed independence and data dependence” has been its dogma ever since.

But that has hardened into a quarantine mindset — and now even smart, structured coordination with the White House is seen as downright dangerous.

There’s no law against such cooperation. Just outdated fear. 

Trump’s call to unite his efforts with the Fed’s cuts through the fog. Independence doesn’t require isolation, and coordination isn’t surrender, but plain sense.  

The Fed and the president both aim to grow the economy and fight inflation — but today, they can (and often do) pull in opposite directions.

In 1977, Congress gave the Fed a dual mandate: keep prices stable and unemployment low. But it didn’t say which takes priority, so the Fed plays both sides. 

Meanwhile, as the president tries to grow the economy with infrastructure investment or energy development, an out-of-the-loop Fed may keep borrowing expensive by not lowering rates.

The Fed’s quantitative easing in recent years illustrates why coordination matters. When the Fed bought trillions in government bonds during the pandemic, it directly lowered the cost of borrowing, impacting every aspect of fiscal activity from Wall Street to Main Street.

Now, quantitative tightening is pressuring long-term interest rates higher as the Fed tries to quash inflation that has yet to materialize — costing the United States an additional $900 billion a year, Trump has exclaimed.

Those are just two weapons the Fed uses to impact fiscal policy without giving fiscal policymakers a seat at the table, a misalignment that hurts American families.

Because of the Fed’s self-imposed wall, it often learns of White House policy decisions the same way the public does — through press releases and even social media. 

There’s “a great deal of uncertainty about where tariff policies are going to settle out,” Powell himself admitted recently.

That leaves the Fed flying blind as executive orders on trade, immigration and energy move markets, and tax policy changes investment flows.

Outside of emergencies like the 2008 financial crisis, the United States has no formal structure to coordinate monetary and fiscal policy. 

That’s not how to run the world’s largest economy.

Trump’s musings about appointing himself to the Fed may have been said for dramatic effect — but he’s right: The system needs structural reform to align the institutions responsible for the country’s economic health.  

And we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The infrastructure is already in place.

It includes the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets — made up of representatives from  the Treasury, the Fed and market regulators — and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which brings key agencies together to identify risk.

During crises like the pandemic, these groups allow for broad fiscal cooperation. But they’re not used regularly to coordinate policy.

Trump has the power to change that.

First, he can schedule regular, public-facing coordination meetings of the President’s Working Group, to prod the Treasury and the Fed into frequent, transparent discussion.

Second, he can place a Treasury official from FSOC in the room when the Fed’s rate-setting committee meets, creating a direct link between financial stability oversight, fiscal policy and monetary policy.

These are modest, practical steps that don’t politicize the Fed — just make it smarter and more effective.

For too long, the Fed has operated as if it floats above politics.

But Americans feel the effects of Fed decisions just as much as they feel tax hikes or regulations.

Trump’s persistent criticisms highlight a blind spot: We need a system where fiscal and monetary policy work together — not in the dark.

Let’s fix the framework. The Fed shouldn’t have to make decisions based on Truth Social, and presidents shouldn’t make economic policy without responsive central bankers.

Markets reward clarity. So do voters.

Alan Rechtschaffen is senior lecturer of capital markets law at New York University, former co-chair of its Global Economic Policy Forum and the author of “Capital Markets, Derivatives, and the Law.”