By Pete Schroeder
(Reuters) – The White House plans to nominate Jonathan McKernan, a former member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as full-time director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The White House also intends to nominate Jonathan Gould as the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Brian Quintenz as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The nominations were first reported by Punchbowl News. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, McKernan would take over an agency currently going through a major upheaval after the Trump administration effectively froze the watchdog.
McKernan recently stepped down from the FDIC’s board, where he had served since January 2023. He previously worked as counsel to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee under Republican Senator Pat Toomey, and before that was senior counsel at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a Treasury Department adviser.
Gould most recently was a partner at law firm Jones Day in Washington, and before that worked for crypto firm Bitfury as its chief legal officer. In 2018, Gould was chief counsel for the Senate Banking Committee under then-Chairman Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican.
If confirmed to the OCC, Gould would lead the regulator charged with monitoring large national banks.
The CFTC, which oversees commodity derivatives markets, has traditionally been a junior player in financial policy, but is expected to play a more prominent role as the Trump administration starts to overhaul cryptocurrency regulations.
Quintenz, who is currently head of policy for a16z crypto, the crypto arm of venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, had been advising the Trump transition team on crypto policy, Reuters previously reported.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa and Pete Schroeder in Washington; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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