FDIC's McKernan gets nod to lead CFPB; Gould picked for OCC

Bloomberg News

The White House has nominated former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board member Jonathan McKernan to be the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and attorney Jonathan Gould to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The nominations were among a list of presidential nominations sent by the White House to the Senate on Tuesday evening, a copy of which was reviewed by American Banker.

Both McKernan and Gould — a partner at the law firm Jones Day and former chief counsel of the OCC in the first Trump administration — were on the short list of Trump administration picks to lead the agencies and considered allies of the banking industry. 

The next step in the nomination process is for the Senate Banking Committee to hold a hearing on both nominations to lead the CFPB and OCC on a permanent basis. Both agencies are under fire from the Trump administration, which is cutting the federal workforce to pay for an extension of his 2017 tax cuts for corporations. 

The CFPB in particular has been demoralized by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency amid efforts by President Trump's two acting directors telling civil service employees to stand down and stop working. Federal workers are confused due to the chaos created by the Trump administration's back-to-work requirements and deferred compensation buyout offers.

During the Biden administration, McKernan was one of two Republican appointees on a majority-Democratic FDIC board, when he notably opposed the proposed Basel III endgame capital rules, which would have raised minimum capital requirements and were fiercely opposed by banks. He also served as co–chairman of a special FDIC committee reviewing allegations of sexual harassment and professional misconduct at the federal regulator.

A longtime regulator who is both diplomatic and cordial, McKernan has a reputation for getting into the weeds of policy. He is a former senior policy counsel at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and served a stint as Republican staff counsel on the Senate Banking Committee.

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McKernan previously served as counsel to former Senate Banking Committee ranking member Pat Toomey, R-Penn., served on the committee staff and was a senior policy advisor at the Treasury Department. He also worked for Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., as a senior financial policy advisor. 

Gould was a top staffer on the Senate Banking Committee — chaired at the time by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. — when he was tapped in 2018 to be No. 2 at the OCC under former Comptroller Joseph Otting. He served as the OCC's senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel overseeing all the agency's legal functions including regulating banks. 

During his tenure, the OCC eased regulations of small banks with the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act and sought reforms to the Volcker rule, including streamlined exemptions for underwriting, market-making and hedging activities. The OCC chartered the first fintech and crypto banks under his watch and recognized crypto-related activities as permissible — a topic of great interest to the second Trump administration. 

In 2022, Gould was named chief legal officer of Bitfury, a bitcoin and crypto company based in Amsterdam, where former acting OCC Director Brian Brooks was CEO. He then joined the law firm Jones Day as a partner later that year. He also has been a director at BlackRock and at Promontory Financial Group.