President Donald Trump has nominated Jonathan McKernan as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Jonathan Gould as the Comptroller of the Currency, and Brian Quintenz as Commodities and Futures Trading Commission Chair.
Quintenz will lead a CFTC opening its mind to crypto, while McKernan will oversee a moribund CFPB. Gould’s position will require critical decisions concerning banks’ capital buffer requirements.
Both Gould and Quintenz are veterans of their respective agencies, while McKernan previously served at the FDIC.
The picks were widely lauded by several banking industry advocacy groups, who praised the nominees’ enthusiasm for deregulation.
OCC
Jonathan Gould was nominated to be the Comptroller of the Currency. He previously served as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel at the OCC from 2018 to 2021. During his previous tenure at the OCC, he aided the implementation of the Economic Growth Act, which lessened regulatory burdens imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act on small banks.
After departing the OCC at the start of the Biden administration, he became chief legal officer of Bitfury, a blockchain technology company. He then joined Jones Day as a partner, where he strategically advised financial institutions.
Gould was critical of the plan to implement controversial capital buffers under the Basel III Endgame. That plan, which would have taken effect in July, is now likely to be scaled back or scrapped entirely.
CFPB
Jonathan McKernan is set to become the next director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB).
McKernan previously sat on the board of the FDIC, where he advocated for increased transparency and criticized overly complex rulemaking. He also led an investigation into allegations of endemic professional misconduct at the agency.
If confirmed, he will replace acting CFPB director Russell Vought, who implemented a halt to all of the CFPBs operations and laid off swathes of staff members. Vought took over from previous CFPB acting director and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who replaced Biden-appointed Rohit Chopra.
The nomination of a permanent director suggests that the Trump administration sees some future for the CFPB, which has come under attack from Elon Musk’s highly influential Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE.)
But what shape the already-handicapped CFPB will take under McKernan’s direction, if the bureau still functionally exists, is unclear. There is some speculation that the CFPB might redirect its focus to hot-button conservative issues such as politically-motivated debanking, which the CFPB began to investigate in the final weeks of Chopra’s tenure.
CFTC
Brian Quintenz is set to replace outgoing chair Rostin Behnam at the CFTC. Quintenz previously served as Trump-appointed commissioner at the agency, from 2017 to 2021. During his tenure at the CFTC, Quintenz advocated for including certain classes of crypto as CFTC-regulated commodities, and celebrated its potential.
Since then, he has been the global head of policy for Andreesen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency division. He also sits on the board of event contract marketplace Kalshi, which recently defeated the CFTC in a lawsuit to void the agency’s classification of election-based contracts as prohibited “gaming.”
Quintenz is expected to take on a crypto-heavy portfolio as the CFTC is likely to assume expanded authority over digital commodities such as bitcoin and ether in the coming years. His appointment marks a sea change as the Trump administration moves to deregulate the market.
“The future of crypto in the U.S. is bright – it’s the perfect time to build here, and we’re excited about the possibility for regulatory clarity to finally come,” Quintenz wrote in a blog post, referring to the CFTC and SEC’s tendency to pursue aggressive crypto enforcement actions in lieu of clear direction from Congress.
