When you’re a nation getting ready to borrow $10 trillion or more over the next decade, you don’t want markets questioning your central bank’s commitment to controlling inflation.

But Congress continues to risk just such a scenario, whether through aggressively questioning Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke or pushing a bill to audit Fed monetary policy.

Now Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has suggested curbing the authority of the 12 Fed regional bank presidents.

As Frank sees things, monetary policy should not be influenced by “inappropriately placed private businessmen — or women, occasionally — picked by other private businessmen, and occasionally women.”

Drill down a bit and it’s clear that what really bugs Frank is not so much that regional bank presidents are selected by a nine-person panel, six of whom are elected by bankers. He just thinks they’re too hawkish.

Frank even commissioned and publicized a study that found that 97 percent of the hawkish dissents at Federal Open Market Committee meetings during the past decade were from the regional bank presidents.

Of course, higher rates would have been a good thing, given that the Fed’s extraordinarily easy monetary policy was a huge contributor to the financial crisis. And going forward, the Fed will face the economically and politically challenging task of withdrawing monetary stimulus when economic growth may well be sluggish and unemployment high.

But such medicine may be necessary to prevent an inflation outbreak. Congressional threats and bullying will make a hard job even more arduous.

Moreover, one reason the Fed has a decentralized structure is because of historic concerns about monetary policy serving only Washington and Wall Street.

Yet citizen concerns about the concentration of financial power are as alive today as they were in 1913 at the Fed’s creation. Monetary policy set solely by a presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed Board of Governors should certainly set off alarm bells with bond vigilantes concerned that Washington may try to inflate its way out of its debt problems.

If Congress wants to look at how the Fed conducts its  business, better to focus on better ways to make monetary policy reflect forward-looking market gauges such as commodity prices rather than the unemployment rate or output.

Ultimately, though, the Fed’s problem isn’t too much influence from bankers in Kansas City or Atlanta or Chicago. It’s too much influence from politicians in Washington.