What Trump’s Picks For Financial Regulators Say About His Plans For Policy Reform

President Donald Trump is appointing more leaders to the agencies that oversee banks and financial markets—but experts suggest that his picks may be at odds with the drastic changes his administration has been making to government.

Last week, the White House said it sent the latest financial agency nominees to the Senate, which will vote to confirm them for their years-long terms. Trump’s picks have spent years inside government agencies, on Capitol Hill, or at major Wall Street firms and will no doubt bring a more industry-friendly vision to their agencies. 

However, it remains to be seen how aggressive those leaders will be—and whether they’ll look to reform existing agencies or dismantle them.

Taking Cues From the Dismantling of the CFPB and Trump’s Pick to Lead the Agency

Trump’s appointee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau permanently, Jonathan McKernan, has spent his career in Republican financial policy circles and most recently was on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp board.

The nomination comes as Trump officials continue slashing operations at the CFPB, the agency in charge of policing consumer services at banks and other lenders.

CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, shuttered its headquarters and ordered CFPB staff to stop much of their work. Vought, Trump’s budget director, has been working to scale back the agency as part of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency campaign.

McKernan is a more “conventional” choice to lead the agency, Capital Alpha Partners analyst Ian Katz wrote in a note to clients. CFPB defenders may see McKernan’s pick as relatively good news since he could look to majorly reform the agency’s work rather than gut it, Katz wrote.

Ed Mills, a policy analyst at Raymond James, said McKernan’s pick appears to be at odds with the more aggressive “RIP CFPB” mission proposed by Elon Musk, tech billionaire and Trump adviser.

The selection of an experienced financial regulator is the latest sign that Trump is making a bold announcement and then “following through with a scaled-back response,” Mills wrote in a note to clients. That dynamic should “incentivize the quick confirmation of relatively more conventional picks,” Mills wrote.

Who Are The Other Nominees?

The same could be said for Jonathan Gould, Trump’s pick to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC acronym is far from a household name, but the agency helps oversee some of the country’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. 

Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day, was the OCC’s chief counsel during the last Trump administration. Like McKernan, Gould is a former staffer for Republicans in the Senate banking committee.

Trump has also picked Brian Quintenz, a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission member, to become the agency’s chairman. The agency regulates derivatives products on anything from arcane Wall Street instruments to milk futures. Since leaving the CFTC, Quintenz has been the head of policy for the crypto division of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z.

Quintenz and Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, will be influential as policymakers figure out how to regulate digital assets. Atkins was an SEC commissioner under former President George W. Bush.