Dodd-Frank veterans abound on Biden's financial agency review teams

Among the Biden transition advisers are a number of former Obama administration officials, including some who were involved in the Dodd-Frank reforms that followed the financial crisis.

U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. Credit: Mike Scarcella / ALM

President-elect Joe Biden enlisted advocates for Wall Street reform, along with current and former consumer protection officials, for transition teams tasked with reviewing financial regulators such as the Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling an interest in closely scrutinizing deregulatory steps taken under the Trump administration.

Among the advisers are a number of former Obama administration officials, including some who were involved in the Dodd-Frank reforms that followed the financial crisis and Leandra English, a former top official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who found herself at the center of a standoff over the bureau’s leadership in the first year of Trump’s presidency.

The team focused on the Treasury Department is being led by Don Graves, a former partner at Graves & Horton who served as a counselor to Biden during his vice presidency. Graves, a paid member of the transition team, was most recently a top executive at KeyBank.

The 27-member team also includes John Bentivoglio, a white-collar partner at Skadden, Arps, Slates, Meagher & Flom, who served in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an aide to Biden during his stint as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. An early supporter of Biden’s latest presidential bid, Bentivoglio contributed $2,800 to his campaign in each of the last years.

Another member of the team, Michael Barr, played a key role in the Dodd-Frank reforms as the assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions in the early years of the Obama administration. Barr returned to the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy after leaving the Obama administration in 2010.

Aside from Bentivoglio, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer partner Charles Yi is the only member of the Treasury review team who currently works at a large law firm. Yi, a former chief counsel for the Senate Banking Committee, was the general counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2015 to 2019. Between July and October, he contributed $1,600 to Biden’s presidential campaign, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.

English, who joined the New York Department of Financial Services earlier this year as a senior adviser, is leading the team charged with reviewing the CFPB.

In 2017, English sued to prevent Trump from installing then-White House budget director Mick Mulvaney as the CFPB’s acting director, arguing in Washington federal court that she was the rightful successor to Richard Cordray, who stepped down as director to mount an ultimately unsuccessful run for governor of Ohio. English dropped her lawsuit and left the CFPB in 2018.

Since her departure, the Trump administration prevailed before the Supreme Court in arguing that the CFPB’s director should be removable at the president’s will, and not just for cause. Biden, then, on his arrival at the White House in January, will have full power to replace the consumer bureau’s leader, Kathy Kraninger, before her five-year term is up.

English’s eight-member team includes Manny Alvarez, who was appointed last year as commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight and who is reportedly seen as a possible pick to lead the CFPB under the Biden administration. Also on the review team is David Mayorga, a former CFPB spokesperson who is now director of communications for Karl Racine, the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

Gary Gensler. April 21, 2010. Photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/ ALM

A separate team, tasked with reviewing the Federal Reserve and several regulatory agencies, is being led by Gary Gensler, who led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2009 to 2014. Now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gensler pushed during his tenure for stronger rules around derivatives, a financial product that figured prominently in the 2008 financial crisis.

His team includes Victoria Suarez-Palomo, a senior adviser in Orrick’s public policy practice, who joined the Treasury Department in 2009 and rose to become deputy assistant secretary for business affairs and the department’s public liaison to the business community, labor leaders and advocacy groups. She donated $1,000 to Biden’s campaign between May and October, disclosures show.

The team also includes Dennis Kelleher, the president and CEO of the advocacy group Better Markets, who for years has pressed for a more stringent interpretation of the Dodd-Frank reforms.

“What is at stake is whether the American people are at risk of another Great Depression,” Kelleher told The New York Times in 2012. “We exist to fight back against the forces trying to make us forget just how bad it was.”