With inflation persisting at three times what the Federal Reserve considers acceptable, former Vice President Mike Pence expressed interest in reforming the central bank's dual mandate of balancing price stability with full employment during an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner.

"Years ago, when I was in the Congress, I endorsed the notion that the Fed ought to reconsider its dual mandate," said Pence, who is openly weighing a bid to run for the Republican presidential nomination. "It ought to be focused on protecting the integrity of the dollar and not also be focused on the mission of full employment. It seems to me that that the Fed ought to stick to its business."

Pence indicated that the Fed, which didn't raise interest rates until inflation had reached the highest point in 40 years, was late to the game. But he blames the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act for instigating the rise in price levels.

"The pilot light on the worst inflation in 40 years was lit when Joe Biden and the Democrats in the House and Senate passed a completely unnecessary $1.9 trillion bill in the name of COVID on a party-line vote," said the former Indiana governor. "And I will tell you, I'm proud of the fact that everything we did during that year of the pandemic of the Trump-Pence administration, we did on a bipartisan basis."

Pence said that was to meet the need of American families, the American economy, and American healthcare providers.

"But when Joe Biden came into office — while states are still sitting on billions of dollars in unspent COVID funding — they simply used the pandemic as a means of exploding spending," Pence said. "Economists across the spectrum agree that that's what lit the pilot light on inflation that's been tearing away at the family budgets of millions of Americans. Again, it all comes back to fiscal responsibility."

Pence's openness to focus the Fed solely on inflation, not also on full employment, does align with his remarks during his Vice Presidency, when he endorsed Trump's call for the Fed to lower rates in 2019, back when headline consumer price index inflation fell below the Fed's 2% benchmark.

"America endured, and the world endured the worst pandemic in 100 years, but prior to that, we demonstrated that when you let the American people keep more of what they earn — you lower corporate tax rates to a competitive rate on the world stage, you cut regulations, you unleash American energy, and you expand trade in a way that's, that's free and fair — America happens, America booms," Pence said when standing by his 2019 comments backing interest rate cuts."

Pence said the growth in those first three years was extraordinary and gives him confidence about how quickly they can bring the American economy back today.

"I really do believe that with right policies, but also paired with fiscal responsibility, that we can ensure a return to American prosperity quicker than anyone could imagine. But it's going to take renewed Republican leadership, from the White House to the House and the Senate."

Focusing on the Fed, Pence argues, is not sufficient to tame the current economic situation.

"We literally have gotten far beyond monetary policy and decisions by the Fed," Pence said. "We simply have got to restore fiscal responsibility to our federal government, and that begins by getting the economy growing again. But it goes very quickly to being straight with the American people about the need to take on what is the vast majority of federal spending. That's mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the national debt. Those are the areas that we have to tackle. When we tackle that, that'll do more to strengthen the dollar, strengthen the American economy than anything else we could do."

Although the Federal Reserve was founded by Congress in 1913 specifically to ensure a stable currency, thus interested in taming inflation, promoting full employment was added as a mandate only after World War II. Congressional Democrats have also tried to add minimizing racial and economic inequality to the Fed's mandate in recent years, to no avail.