NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden will nominate Christy Goldsmith Romero to replace Martin Gruenberg as head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The White House announcement on Thursday came after Gruenberg’s tenure was marred by allegations of workplace abuse that led to his resignation.
Goldsmith Romero is a longtime financial regulator and currently serves as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the national regulator for financial derivatives. She previously worked at the Treasury Department and was part of the team that handled the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which lent $700 billion to troubled banks during the 2008 financial crisis. She is also a law professor at Georgetown University.
Her previous appointments to the country’s financial regulators were unanimously confirmed by the Senate.
“She has proven to be a strong, independent and fair regulator who is not afraid to do what is right,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement.
Gruenberg said last month he would resign from the FDIC after an independent report by law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton found incidents of stalking, harassment, homophobia and other labor rule violations, based on more than 500 employee complaints.
Complaints included a woman who said she was stalked and persistently harassed by a co-worker even after she complained about his behavior; a field office supervisor who calls gay men “little girls”; and a female field investigator who described receiving a photo of the genitals from an FDIC senior examiner.
Republicans have been calling on Gruenberg to resign since the allegations emerged late last year. The White House and Gruenberg resisted these calls, in part because the FDIC is led by a five-member board, and his resignation would transfer control of the agency to the FDIC’s vice chairman, who is a Republican. Gruenberg’s resignation would not be official until the nomination for Goldsmith Romero is complete.
“FDIC employees deserve a safe workplace where they can focus on their important mission to ensure our nation’s financial security. Unfortunately, under Chairman Gruenberg’s leadership, that has not been the case,” Senator Tim Scott, the top Republican on the Banking Committee, said in a statement.
The FDIC is one of several regulators of the U.S. banking system. The Great Depression-era agency is best known for running the nation’s deposit insurance program, which insures Americans’ deposits of up to $250,000 in case their bank fails.
