America’s economic ship continues to drift downstream in an ebbing tide, as the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee voted at its Wednesday meeting to lower interest rates by a quarter percentage point, signaling the central bank’s ongoing unease about the health of the U.S. job market. Wednesday’s decision was the Federal Reserve’s third consecutive rate cut, and it brings the target federal funds rate down to between 3.5% and 3.75%.

Yet the board showed unusual division over the decision. The final vote was 9-3, the first time in six years that three governors have dissented in one vote. The dissenters even disagreed among themselves, with Trump loyalist Stephen Miran favoring a larger rate cut of one-half percentage point, while Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee and Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid opposed any rate cut.

In fact, division on the Federal Reserve board runs even deeper than this vote suggests. The board is comprised of 19 members, although only a rotating 12 members vote at any given meeting. However, all 19 officials offer quarterly projections for where they think interest rates should be set. On these predictions, six of the 19 officials penciled in no rate change at the December meeting. This means that four of the seven non-voting board members opposed the interest rate cut. Had different governors been on rotation this month, the vote to cut rates by a quarter point may well have failed.

The dissension arises from the inherent tension between the Federal Reserve’s dual mandates. “The Committee seeks to achieve [1] maximum employment and [2] inflation at the rate of 2% over the longer run,” the Fed explained in a Wednesday press release. “The Committee is attentive to the risks to both sides of its dual mandate and judges that downside risks to employment rose in recent months.”

The U.S. unemployment rate has ticked up from 4.1% in June to 4.4% in September, while the U.S. economy added only 193,000 jobs in the five months from May through September (the economy added 193,000 jobs in May 2024 alone). For a majority of the committee, these anemic employment figures justified yet another interest rate cut.

Meanwhile, the dissenting minority fretted over an equal danger in the opposite direction. On Wednesday, the Fed reiterated its commitment to maintain 2% inflation over the long run. Yet the 12-month inflation rate in September stood at 3.0%, up from 2.3% in April. This inflation rate is “50 percent higher than what the Fed says it wants inflation to be,” noted National Review’s John Puri, disapprovingly. And “We should expect 3 percent inflation to continue because absolutely nothing is being done to stop it.”

Thus, while America’s economic ship is floating down a hazardous channel, the navigators are divided over which sandbar is more dangerous.

One dynamic worthy of further exploration is the change in the Federal Reserve’s posture since earlier this year. For months, the Federal Reserve held interest rates steady as President Trump publicly badgered it to cut rates. Yet it has ended the year by cutting rates at three consecutive meetings. Is this a sign that the Fed finally capitulated to the president’s wishes after he installed his own man on the board? That seems an unlikely move for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May anyway.

The other possibility is that the Federal Reserve changed its behavior in response to changing economic conditions. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $12 billion “in one time bridge payments” for struggling farmers. The press release blamed the farmers’ struggles on “four years of disastrous Biden Administration policies.” But it also named specific causes of pain, “temporary trade market disruptions and increased production costs,” which sound more like side effects of Trump’s tariff regime.

In any event, a November POLITICO/Public First poll found that Americans still remained concerned with pocketbook issues. When asked to name up to three “top issues facing the US at the moment,” its 2,000 respondents named economic issues as the top two concerns. More than half (56%) complained that the “cost of living is too high,” while 32% dinged “the poor state of the economy in general.”

Hopefully, a perplexed Federal Reserve board can navigate America into open water, and soon, so that the average household can find a moment to breathe. Send those economists back to the drawing board to theorize about a way to reduce unemployment and inflation at the same time.