The latest Bloomberg Businessweek exposes a key problem plaguing the Federal Reserve today, whoever ends up serving as the next Fed chair.

The summer-long sniping over the selection of a new chairman feels like bad reality television, with Janet Yellen anonymously accused of lacking gravitas and Lawrence Summers pronounced by one senator as unfit to mow his yard. Last year a bill to audit the Fed passed the Republican-led House 327-98 despite warnings from Chairman Ben Bernanke that the auditing of monetary policy decisions could produce a “nightmare scenario” of political interference.

All this is going to make the next Federal Reserve chairman’s job harder. Although the central bank is a creature of Congress, it has long cultivated a reputation for technocratic independence that helps it carry out essential but unpopular missions such as raising interest rates and bailing out banks. As if its normal work weren’t tough enough, now the Fed also has to try to restore its above-it-all image. If the Fed comes to be seen as a politically compromised institution, perception could become reality, warns Tim Duy, a University of Oregon economist who blogs about the central bank. “There is always the possibility that Congress and a like-minded president could rewrite the Federal Reserve Act to reduce monetary independence,” Duy says.

The Fed brought this on itself, at least in part. The extreme measures it took in 2008 and 2009—emergency lending, bailouts, deep rate cuts—saved the U.S. economy from an even deeper downturn, but they alarmed people who thought the bank was overreaching. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker said in 2008 that the bank extended itself “to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers” in arranging the emergency takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase (JPM).

It’s an open question, of course, whether Fed manipulations “saved the U.S. economy” or just pushed back the date of the nation’s financial reckoning. But it’s certainly clear that more people see the Fed today as a political animal, dependent on the whims of particular government appointees rather than the rule of law.