A century after its founding, the Federal Reserve, with the ability to influence nearly every aspect of public and private economic life, is one of the most powerful agencies in the history of the American Republic. Legal scholars have, for the most part, not taken note. This article is an effort to remedy that lack of attention by exploring the arguable source of the Fed’s power, the institutional features that constitute its extraordinary independence. The article makes two contributions. First, it argues that the prevailing lenses for analyzing Fed independence — agency independence in administrative law and central bank independence in the social sciences — are insufficient to describe the many ways that Fed independence does and does not operate in practice. Instead, the article describes the structure of Fed independence by introducing a more comprehensive approach, called the audience-mechanism framework. That framework evaluates Fed independence by reference to the many audiences — inside and outside government, inside and outside the Federal Reserve System — that shape Fed policy via a collection of legal and non-legal mechanisms. The net effect of these mechanisms, vis-à-vis each audience, constitutes the Fed’s independence from that audience. Second, the article then illustrates the framework through a descriptive topography of Fed independence from private banks (and the Reserve Banks), the President (and the Treasury), and Congress, but also presents a preliminary map for evaluating independence from audiences such as other agencies, international central bankers, Fed career employees, and others. In the process of that descriptive topography, the article challenges widespread mischaracterizations about, for example, the nature of the Fed’s budgetary independence (which is not expressly authorized by statute), the consequences of the Governors’ fourteen-year terms (which are almost never served), the role of the Reserve Banks within the System, and other aspects of Fed independence that figure prominently in academic and policy discussions. The upshot of the audience-mechanism framework is that the spirited debates regarding Fed independence are essentially meaningless when that independence is not specified by audience and mechanism. The more theoretically comprehensive and descriptively accurate characterization that the audience-mechanism framework allows, then, is essential for academics and policy-makers engaged in debates about the nature of the Fed, its past, and, increasingly, its future.