President Donald Trump intends to nominate attorney Jonathan McKernan as the Treasury Department’s head of domestic finance, a surprise move given he was previously tapped to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
McKernan has been working as an adviser at the Treasury while awaiting confirmation for the CFPB role, Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement Friday. McKernan, previously a board member at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., had sat for a Senate confirmation hearing for that job earlier this year.
“McKernan has become an integral part of the secretary’s senior team,” according to the Treasury statement. “His continued service at Treasury will ensure that his experience and expertise are best put to advancing the president’s America First agenda.”
The undersecretary position requires Senate confirmation. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether McKernan’s nomination to lead the CFPB is being rescinded.
McKernan has been leading Bessent-hosted meetings with the Federal Reserve and other bank agencies as Treasury takes a bigger role in streamlining oversight and coordinating plans to ease regulation, Bloomberg News reported last month. The department plans to take the lead on crafting recommendations on the policy agenda for financial rules, people familiar with the discussions said at the time.
The domestic finance job is one of three undersecretary roles at the Treasury Department, along with international and terror-finance oversight. The head of domestic finance oversees debt-management and the smooth functioning of the $29 trillion Treasuries market.
Nellie Liang, a former Federal Reserve official who served as undersecretary in the Biden administration, played a key role in exploring ways to strengthen the liquidity and transparency of debt trading. The job also entails engaging with financial regulators around the world, and managing ties with Wall Street.
The pending nomination puts the future path of the CFPB in question. A legal filing by the union representing the consumer bureau’s staff has estimated that some 1,500 of the CFPB’s 1,700 staff could be fired. A federal judge said last month that the CFPB couldn’t proceed with agency-wide job cuts while the court weighs whether the terminations would violate an earlier injunction blocking the agency from shutting down.
At the FDIC, McKernan had pushed repeatedly for more oversight of large asset managers, saying their size and concentrated ownership could give firms undue influence over the management and strategy of US banks. His effort had won some support from former FDIC board member Rohit Chopra, a Democrat who previously led the CFPB.
McKernan also oversaw a special panel in charge of implementing the findings of an independent, third-party review of the regulator’s workplace culture following an investigation by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. The law firm’s report had found credible allegations of “sexual harassment, discrimination and other interpersonal misconduct” at the agency.
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