(FORTUNE Magazine) – Alan Greenspan can move interest rates and rattle financial markets with just a few words, yet he can't seem to cajole Congress into giving him the help he needs. The otherwise almighty Federal Reserve Board chairman has only four governors instead of the usual six to run the Fed Board of Governors.

Greenspan doesn't select his own co-workers but welcomes them to the Board after a lengthy process of White House nomination and Senate confirmation. But election-year political wrangling has halted the Fed appointment process. Despite the Fed's importance and growing workload, Greenspan will have to make do until 2001 with his four co-governors--vice chair Roger W. Ferguson, Laurence H. Meyer, Edward M. Gramlich, and Edward W. Kelley.

But even the status of some of those governors is in flux. Kelley has taken a sabbatical to recuperate from recent heart surgery. Ferguson lingers on the board even though his term expired Feb. 1. (Fed rules allow him to stay until he's reconfirmed for a 14-year term or replaced.) His Fed track record should have allowed him to transcend the election-year jinx, like Greenspan, who moved from nomination to confirmation within a week at the end of January. But Ferguson's confirmation is stalled in the Senate along with that of retired Chase Manhattan executive Carol J. Parry. The last Fed seat remains empty, without a sitting governor or a nominee. If Ferguson and Parry are not eventually confirmed, Ferguson must step down and the next president will reap a three-seat Fed vacancy bonanza.

At his January reconfirmation hearing, Greenspan testified, "Working with five governors instead of seven obviously puts more burden on the rest of us. But we have managed." He noted that in the case of a major financial crisis, the board has only the minimum number of voters needed to exercise an obscure economic rescue clause, last applied in 1936, that allows the Fed to lend emergency funds to crucial financial institutions, corporations, and individuals.

Even without an economic crisis, the remaining Fed governors have an enormous amount of work to do. They meet regularly to discuss national and international economic trends, steer monetary policy, regulate the banking system, and generally stabilize the financial system. Each Fed governor also sits on the Federal Open Market Committee, which buys and sells government securities to influence money markets and interest rates. Furthermore, the Fed must regulate a new category of financial holding companies created under the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which dissolved the Glass-Steagall era barriers between commercial and investment banking.

The White House seems willing to gamble on leaving the vacancies for the next President. It took 14 months to nominate Parry after Susan Phillips, now a dean at George Washington University, resigned in June 1998. If the White House decides to announce a third nominee in 2000, Gene Sperling, chairman of the National Economic Council, would spearhead the effort, along with Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Martin Baily. None of the three would comment on who is being considered and whether a nominee would be announced this year.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm controls the committee's slate and acknowledges that it hasn't even scheduled confirmation hearings for Parry and Ferguson. The Texas Republican feels that "in the waning months of an Administration, should you put someone in a position for 14 years, or wait and let the new President do it?" Senate Democrats contested that logic during Greenspan's January hearing. "With each day, as the clock ticks down to the next election, it would appear to be more and more political," said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. If so, the Fed board will continue to bear its heavy load, and Ferguson and Parry will count the days until November's election.

--Noshua Watson