U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is calling for a review of the central bank’s operations as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell faces mounting pressure to resign.

In a new interview with Bloomberg Television, Bessent says that the Federal Reserve is in need of deeper scrutiny as its budget and operations have expanded over the years.

Bessent’s comments come as President Donald Trump has said he hopes Powell quits and has also considered attempting to remove him, all while slamming the Fed chair for not cutting interest rates.

“The President has said he is not going to fire Chair Powell. I was somewhat surprised that [economist] Mohamed El-Erian came out and said that [Powell should resign]. And what I’ve come out and said is that I believe that it would do Chair Powell a favor, and he would be doing the institution a favor, if he did an internal review, separate monetary policy from everything else.

And this is something that [economist and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury] Larry Summers and I agree on, is this mission creep from the Fed is endangering their independence of monetary policy, all these other things that they’re engaging in could threaten monetary policy.

It is a big, sprawling institution. The central budget for the board is up 4x since 2004, and every institution needs to examine themselves.”

Bessent also says he’d support Powell overseeing the agency’s review, despite the criticism he’s facing.

“It could be a committee. It could be a group. They could invite outside experts in. The Bank of England after the 2022 rate hike shock went back and did a very good examination of what went wrong with monetary policy that brought in outside experts. I think an internal review would be a good start. And if the internal review didn’t look like it was serious, then maybe their could be an external review.”

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Editor’s take: In Colossus: The Forbin Project, an advanced supercomputer becomes sentient and enslaves humankind. Colossus is also the name of the storage platform where almost all of Google’s internet services reside. Though we don’t know if the company took direct inspiration from the classic sci-fi movie, the connotations are still present.

In a recent blog post, Google revealed some of the “secrets” hiding behind Colossus, a massive network infrastructure the company describes as its universal storage platform. Colossus is robust, scalable, and easy to use and program. Google said the massive machine still uses tried-and-true (yet still evolving) magnetic hard disk drives.

Colossus powers many Google services, including YouTube, Gmail, Drive, and more. The platform evolved from the Google File System project, a distributed storage system for managing large, data-intensive applications, making things more manageable. Surprisingly, Google supercharged Colossus by installing an exclusive cache technology that relies on fast solid-state drives.

Google builds one Colossus file system per cluster in a data center. Many of these clusters are powerful enough to manage multiple exabytes of storage, with two file systems, in particular, hosting more than 10 exabytes of data each. The company claims that Google-powered applications or services should never run out of disk space within a Google Cloud zone.

The data throughput in a Colossus file system is impressive. Google claims that the largest clusters “regularly” exceed read rates of 50 terabytes per second, while write rates are up to 25 terabytes per second.

“This is enough throughput to send more than 100 full-length 8K movies every second,” the company said.

Storing data in the right place is essential for achieving this kind of over-the-top performance. Colossus internal users can dictate if their files need to go to an HDD or an SSD, but most developers employ an automated solution known as L4 distributed SSD caching. This technology uses machine learning algorithms to decide what policy to apply to specific data blocks. However, the system eventually writes any new data to the HDDs.

The L4 caching tech can (partially) solve this problem over time by observing I/O patterns, segregating files into specific “categories,” and simulating different storage placements. According to Google’s documentation, these storage policies include “place on SSD for one hour,” “place on SSD for two hours,” and “don’t place on SSD.”

When simulations correctly predict the file access patterns, a small portion of data is put on SSDs to absorb most initial read operations. Data is eventually migrated to cheaper storage (HDDs) to minimize the overall hosting cost.

“As the basis for all of Google and Google Cloud, Colossus is instrumental in delivering reliable services for billions of users, and its sophisticated SSD placement capabilities help keep costs down and performance up while automatically adapting to changes in workload,” the company said. “We’re proud of the system we’ve built so far and look forward to continuing to improve the scale, sophistication, and performance.”