Donald Trump lent his support to Sen. Rand Paul’s plan to audit the Federal Reserve on Monday, endorsing the idea in a tweet that accused his rival Sen. Ted Cruz of failing to support it.
It is so important to audit The Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016
“It is so important to audit the Federal Reserve,” the Republican presidential candidate and billionaire businessman tweeted Monday afternoon.
He also criticized Cruz, the conservative Texas senator also vying for the GOP nomination, for missing a Senate vote on auditing the central bank.
The legislation in question was a measure introduced by Paul, a Kentucky Republican who was a contender for the Republican nomination. While still in the the running, Paul had criticized Cruz for missing a vote on advancing the bill.
Monday was the first time that Trump expressed support for the idea of the Fed audit, a policy that is widely supported by Republicans but denounced as an infringement on the central bank’s independence by members of the Fed, the Obama administration and academia.
The Fed’s financial statements are regularly audited, but Paul’s bill would have subjected its monetary policy deliberations to a Government Accountability Office policy audit. Currently, those meetings and discussions are shielded from GAO audits, a policy that Chairwoman Janet Yellen has said is necessary to prevent short-term political considerations from influencing monetary policy.
While Trump had not previously backed the audit, he has accused the Fed of malfeasance.
In November, he accused Yellen of keeping interest rates low at President Obama’s direction. He has said that the Fed’s stimulus policies have inflated a financial bubble, and that it is maintaining low rates until after Obama leaves office to avoid having the bubble pop on his watch.
Earlier, Trump expressed admiration for Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan generally credited with ending the era of out-of-control inflation.
