Statement: USPIRG applauds Biden nominees Chopra to head CFPB and Gensler to chair SEC

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U.S. PIRG

Both choices would be huge wins for consumers

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden announced Monday that he intends to nominate Rohit Chopra as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director and Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Gensler was a partner at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, then joined the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department. He served as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama and recently served as chair of the Maryland Financial Consumer Protection Commission.

Chopra was an early hire by Elizabeth Warren to help stand up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and then was named as the CFPB’s first statutory student loan ombudsman and director of its Office of Students. He has served as a Federal Trade Commissioner since May 2018.

Ed Mierzwinski, U.S. PIRG’s senior director for federal consumer programs and Mike Litt, U.S. PIRG’s consumer campaign director, issued the following statements:

“Rohit Chopra has the ideal background for hitting the ground running at the CFPB,” Litt said. “He helped build the CFPB from the start, served as its first student loan ombudsman and has most recently been a Federal Trade Commissioner. In his government service, he has used all policy levers available to protect consumers from corporate wrongdoers. We couldn’t be happier with his selection to restore the CFPB after three years of disastrous leadership.”

“Gary Gensler possesses the critical skills necessary to fix the SEC, which has engaged in dangerous deregulation that suggests its leadership has forgotten or ignored the lessons of the financial collapse of 2008,” Mierzwinski said. “He wasn’t afraid to take on Wall Street as chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and will return the SEC to an agency that both protects small investors from risky practices and protects the financial system from dangerous actors.”

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