President Donald Trump is just about done naming the key figures he’s seeking to get into financial regulation posts that will direct the future oversight of the crypto industry, now including lawyer Jonathan Gould as a nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees U.S. national banks.
With a widely circulated White House nominations document showing Trump has settled on Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day who was a top lawyer at the OCC and a former crypto executive, and the president will reportedly nominate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s Jonathan McKernan to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the slate is almost clear.
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Gould had briefly worked as the chief legal officer for blockchain technology company Bitfury after he left the OCC as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel during the first Trump administration. At Bitfury, he worked for CEO Brian Brooks, who Trump had once installed at the OCC as an acting comptroller and also tried to make it permanent. At the OCC, Brooks worked to open U.S. banking for crypto firms, and he elevated Anchorage Digital as the first and only crypto bank chartered by the agency. Now the industry will find out if Gould will follow in those footsteps.
“For crypto, we believe Gould could seek to revive the concept of a limited-purpose national bank charter,” said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at TD Cowen, in a note to clients on Wednesday. “That could lead to banks that specialize in crypto. We also believe he would permit banks to get more involved with crypto including stablecoins.”
Rodney Hood, a former Republican chief of the National Credit Union Association, had been placed as Trump’s temporary comptroller and would be replaced by Gould if he wins his Senate confirmation. Temporary Republican replacements like Hood are now leading most of the financial regulators, including banking agencies, the FDIC and OCC; the pair of markets regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and the consumer watchdog CFPB.
At the CFPB, the Trump administration’s effort to gut the regulator with the assignment of his budget director, Russ Vought, as its interim leader has drawn vigorous protests from congressional Democrats. Now he’s announced the name he wants to eventually replace Vought there: McKernan, a Republican member of the FDIC. McKernan had served as a staffer for former Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who had led an early (failed) charge to get stablecoins regulated in the U.S.
Ian Katz, a veteran financial-regulation analyst in Washington, noted the “conventional” pick of Gould for the OCC and the other recent choices for permanent chiefs of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that probably won’t ruffle feathers among the U.S. senators that will evaluate their nominations. The relatively sedate choices seem to hew closely to Trump’s model for financial regulators during his first term: No dramatic surprises.
Unlike some of Trump’s personnel decisions in his cabinet and other agencies, the choices are experienced and are absent political firebrands, including the pick of longtime securities consultant and former Commissioner Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Virtually all of the names — temporary and those nominated for permanent roles — have crypto backgrounds or have demonstrated support.
The Senate must still confirm all of these nominees, and that process often takes months into an incoming president’s first year. Sometimes the confirmations fail entirely, and agencies are left with permanently acting heads, like the OCC was during the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, Trump also picked former Commissioner Brian Quintenz to run the CFTC, where sitting Commissioner Caroline Pham has been holding down the fort and making major agency changes as acting chairman. So far, Pham and other acting agency heads have already begun work to overhaul Biden-era crypto policy.
