Remember “Audit the Fed”? It was the call that united populists of the right and left (and quite a few terrified centrists) around the cause of congressional investigators poking around the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, including its setting of interest rate policies.

And it’s back, with a new campaign from Senator Rand Paul (whose father led the earlier version) to push for a bill to do just that in a now-Republican-led Congress. But to make sense of the debate, here’s the simple fact you need to keep in mind: When people say they want to audit the Fed, what they really mean is “The Fed is doing things I disagree with.”

It’s easy to say that the Fed is a very secretive, mysterious institution. That has certainly been true historically, and in some respects remains true today. But in most of the ways that matter, the Fed is actually more transparent about what it decides to do, why and how it carries those policies out than almost any other institution in government.

As of Feb. 4, the Fed had $4.461 trillion in assets on its books, numbers that are updated every week. Want to know what those assets are? Well, actually, you can go to the New York Fed’s website and see the Fed’s securities holdings down to the individual exact bond holding. That’s how I know, for example, that as of Feb. 4 the Fed owned precisely $449.94 million worth of United States Treasury notes that mature April 30, 2015. The CUSIP code is #912828MZ0, in case you happen to know what a CUSIP code is (it is a numbering system to identify a particular bond or other security.)