Strategic repoliticisation: inflation, blame, and the fracturing of democratic accountability in the United States

When inflation returned to the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic after decades of price stability, it created a critical test for the accountability mechanisms underpinning the system of delegated monetary policy governance. Using a mixed-methods analysis of congressional testimony, press conferences, and political communications on X during the 2021–2022 mid-term cycle, this paper examines whether Congress subjected the Federal Reserve to genuine accountability through reciprocal oversight, or whether the crisis prompted genuine repoliticisation by restoring inflation management to democratic control. The analysis reveals neither occurred. Instead, systematic strategic repoliticisation operated across formal and public arenas. Political actors engaged largely in procedural scrutiny of the Federal Reserve's institutional performance whilst robustly contesting the partisan drivers of inflation. Republicans attributed inflation to the Democrats’ fiscal policies and the Fed's progressive ‘mission creep’; Democrats blamed corporate behaviour, global energy shocks and supply chain disruptions; the Federal Reserve blamed external shocks and the Democrats’ fiscal stimulus whilst framing monetary tightening's distributional consequences as technical necessities. Strategic repoliticisation thus represents political contestation that reinforces rather than dismantles technocratic autonomy through mechanisms of agenda-setting power, revealing how the democratic deficit in delegated inflation management is actively maintained rather than passively inherited.