The Senate Banking Committee advanced, by a 13-11 party-line vote Thursday, the nomination of former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board member Jonathan McKernan to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
McKernan’s nomination now goes to the full Senate, where it must receive 50 votes or more for confirmation. If confirmed, he would replace Acting Director Russ Vought atop the agency.
Thursday’s vote, however, came amid diverging statements from the banking panel’s top two senators.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, the panel’s chair, cautioned that Thursday’s committee vote “is not just a formality; it’s a commitment to putting our nation back on track after years of uncertainty and stagnation.”
A vote to put McKernan atop the CFPB, Scott said, would “ensure accountability and much-needed reforms to curtail the weaponization of this rogue agency.”
Republicans have long derided the CFPB as aggressively punitive. Under its Biden-era director, Rohit Chopra, the agency sued Capital One, Comerica and peer-to-peer payments platform Zelle – all in the last two months of Chopra’s tenure – and issued a flurry of final rules on open banking, a limit on overdraft fees and oversight of big-tech firms. The CFPB under Vought has dropped its lawsuits against Capital One and Zelle, while its overdraft rule has been challenged in court, and lawmakers have moved to repeal its big-tech oversight rule.
As a counterpoint to Scott, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, the panel’s ranking member and an architect of the CFPB, released what she labeled “disqualifying responses” to 67 questions McKernan answered ahead of his nomination hearing last week.
McKernan “provided non-answers that regurgitated the agency’s obligations under the law,” Warren asserted, further accusing Republicans of trying to “jam … through” the nominations “even before the FBI has completed a standard background investigation” for the former FDIC official.
“The north star here is you’ve got to follow the law fully and faithfully execute the statute,” McKernan said at the hearing in response to Warren. “I take that very seriously, as a former congressional staffer, I’m an Article 1 guy, I’m going to make sure the CFPB performs each of its statutorily performed functions.”
“You follow the law, then we’ll all be good,” Warren replied.
In her statement Thursday, though, Warren noted that reports that the CFPB was dropping its lawsuit against Capital One broke during the hearing – timing, she asserted, that seemed “designed to embarrass you and to show exactly who is in charge of this agency right now: Elon Musk and his little band of hackers.”
The Department of Government Efficiency, linked to Musk, infiltrated the CFPB on Feb. 6.
News of the dropped lawsuit also ran counter to what McKernan had told senators a day earlier, about reviewing the CFPB’s pending litigation if confirmed, Warren contended.
“Who’s going to be in charge here?” Sen. Tina Smith, D-MN, asked McKernan at the hearing. “It’s not clear to me, because at the moment that we’re sitting here talking about you taking on this responsibility, Russell Vought or others are dismissing lawsuits that you just told me you were going to have the opportunity to review.”
In the month since taking charge at the CFPB, Vought has issued a stop-work order to the agency’s employees – with few exceptions; closed the bureau’s headquarters; overseen the firing of probationary and term employees; and would have launched a grand-scale layoff, court witnesses argued, were it not for a judge’s temporary injunction.
In his statement in support of McKernan and nominees for three other federal agency leadership posts, Scott touched on the nation’s socioeconomic divide.
“By confirming these qualified nominees, we are sending a clear message: the blue-collar comeback has begun,” Scott said.
But lower-income consumers are exactly the people most likely to be harmed through the Trump administration’s efforts to declaw the CFPB, Warren and other defenders of the bureau argue.
