A U.S. Senate panel on Thursday voted along party lines to advance President Donald Trump's nomination of Capital One executive Brian Johnson to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, setting up a vote by the full Senate. The Republican-led Senate Banking Committee voted 13-11 to approve Johnson's nomination over Democratic objections that he is too close to the industry he would be expected to oversee and that the White House put forward his name after initially seeking to destroy the CFPB outright. The panel also approved the nominations of William Pulte to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Stephen Miran as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. It was not immediately clear when the full Senate could take up Johnson's nomination. However, the Trump administration has said it paused previous plans to fire the vast majority of CFPB staff to allow Johnson, who served as the CFPB's deputy director during the first Trump administration, to consider whether to pursue them. From 2023 until last month, Jonathan McKernan served as a Republican board member at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, where he was an outspoken critic of former Chairman Martin Gruenberg’s response to a sexual harassment scandal and oversaw reform efforts. While Trump and key adviser Elon Musk have said that the CFPB should be eliminated, McKernan pledged in confirmation hearings last month that he would “fully and faithfully” enforce consumer financial laws but he criticized the agency for what he viewed as excessive enforcement and regulatory overreach. In the midst of his testimony, the agency’s current leadership dismissed five pending enforcement actions brought by the prior administration, an unprecedented move. Since taking over the CFPB in February, the Trump administration has also summarily dismissed scores of employees, canceled more than 170 contracts, placed most staff on administrative leave, paused the effective dates for recently adopted regulations, moved to cancel the lease on CFPB headquarters and defaced the agency’s website. In the face of legal challenges, the agency has attempted to undo some of these changes and has agreed not to dismiss more CPFB workers for now. But for that agreement, however, officials had planned to dismiss virtually all staff in mid-February, according to lawyers for an employee union.
