The Federal Reserve is mobilizing against Sen. Rand Paul's increasingly popular effort to audit the central bank.

“This is about interfering with the making of monetary policy. I respect the gentleman from Kentucky, but he’s wrong,” said Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher on Fox Business Monday evening.

“We are audited out the wazoo."

Fisher was one of several Fed officials to speak out Monday against Paul’s bill to have the Government Accountability Office audit the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations and report to Congress.

In a separate appearance on Fox Business, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser said the Fed audit is “scary” because it would mean that “you are going to have political interference in the short term to try to influence and shape policy decisions” that should be left to the independent central bank.

In a sign of how seriously the Fed is taking Paul’s effort, Jerome Powell, one of the five members of the Fed’s Board of Governors, gave a speech at Catholic University Monday solely dedicated to Paul’s bill and other efforts to increase congressional oversight of the Fed.

Powell said the idea that the Fed acted in secret or was not accountable during its efforts to counteract the financial crisis was “a perspective that is in violent conflict with the facts.”

The former George H.W. Bush Treasury official also said the legislation was “a stepping stone to abolishing the Fed.”

The Fed's finances are already audited by an outside accountant, and most of its functions are audited by the GAO. Paul's bill, however, would undo the exemption that shields monetary policy from GAO audits, a move deeply opposed by Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, the White House and Wall Street.

But the general public is overwhelmingly in favor of new legislation to audit the Fed, and Paul is tapping into that populist sentiment.

“Whenever we go through periods like the one recently where there’s a great deal of dissatisfaction with the outcomes, there are usually pressures to do things about the Fed,” said Allan Meltzer, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon and the author of a history of the Federal Reserve.

Paul also anticipated the Fed's counteroffensive while in Iowa over the weekend.

“Anybody feel that the Fed’s out to get us? They’re all over the TV! They’re going to be out there saying, ‘Oh, we can’t audit the Fed.’ What, are they too big to be audited? Too secret to be audited?” the libertarian Republican said Friday at an “Audit the Fed” event, according to Bloomberg.

Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, also continued drumming up support for his legislation over social media and mailing campaigns.

Legislation to impose new congressional brakes on the Fed is nothing new. But with a new Republican majority in Congress and anti-Fed sentiment running fairly high, some analysts believe that Paul’s bill could go further than previous efforts, even in the face of resistance from the Obama White House and the financial services industry.

The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015, Paul’s bill, has 30 cosponsors. Among them is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Paul’s fellow Republican from Kentucky.

Tony Fratto, a partner at communications firm Hamilton Place Strategies that represents some financial firms, noted that establishment support for a Fed audit is new, even though there has always been a populist strain in U.S. politics, going back to at least William Jennings Bryan, skeptical of centralized monetary policy.

“What I’ve seen recently is, for populist political reasons, some more people have been willing to entertain and lend some credibility to some of the critics” of the Fed, said Fratto, who warned that auditing the Fed’s monetary policy would be dangerous.

“I still don’t believe that at the end of the day it’s going to go very far,” Fratto said, “but I am worried and disappointed at the number of people who are willing to entertain some of these ideas.”

One advantage that Paul has is that Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, may be interested in some form of a Fed audit. Shelby said after Paul’s bill was introduced that he would like to see some form of audit, although his office did not clarify whether he supported the specific provisions of Paul’s bill.

“You have a Tea Party element behind the bill,” said Brian Gardner, a political analyst at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, noting the support of Paul and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. With Shelby’s possible support, “now you have somebody who’s really of the old school in the Senate, kind of the consummate dealmaker, it’s a very interesting dynamic.”

“The old guard and young Turks might be collaborating on this,” Gardner added, noting that Shelby might have the political skill, if he wanted, to attach a Fed audit bill to other legislation the White House would have trouble vetoing.

The Paul bill is one of many that Shelby at the committee level and McConnell in the full chamber must decide among during a packed legislative schedule. It could easily get lost due to time constraints or a lack of support, but it already has enough momentum to have the Fed worried.