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Yes, otherwise we will be heading towards another depression.
Remove the word independent from the end. Okay good, now my answer is no.
Independent of what?
(I ask this because with the current system, it is not "independent" of any overarching authority body, so I'm curious which form its dependency is intended to be in. And more than likely that it already shares this dependent form making the question's "remain" a little misleading).
Okay, on this subject I do have "some" knowledge which I garnered from my late Father-In-Law who was a senior financial officer with Wells Fargo & Co. in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's.
The Federal Reserve is based on the ability of the Government to tax the population, and that is its ONLY means of existence. Should the entire population of the United States decide en masse to not pay any taxes at all to the Federal Government, the Federal Reserve would cease to exist – however, I think that the Government would try to use our armed forces to extract the taxes from the population.
If you care to check it out, Google "Gold Standard Dollar" and "Silver Certificate" and find out when we discontinued issuing those notes and then Google "Federal Reserve Note" and find out who instituted the Federal Reserve and why he later stated that his only regret was signing the Federal Reserve into law . . . . . I guarantee that it will make some interesting reading for you.
Clearly you're not studying monetary policy history… or you would know that a large part of the blame for both 1929,1937, and even 2008 could be pinned on a contractionary monetary position taken by the Fed. And not much else.
The Fed can resolve some financial crisises before they happen… or create economic growth (see the 1980s), but it can also create some big ones by sitting on its hands at crucial points. That is to say, an independent Fed doesn't guarantee there wouldn't be a depression anymore than a dependent Fed doesn't guarantee there wouldn't be inflation. It's a human institution which sometimes takes human errors and magnifies them into major economic crisises. The standard monetarist position is to make it a very small mission for human technocrats and basically automate the printing of money instead of presuming they will always do the right thing because they're "removed" from political influence.