Senate Dems press for oversight hearing before year-end

• Key insight: The Senate Banking Committee hasn’t had an oversight hearing of prudential banking regulators since May 2024. 
• What’s at stake: The lack of oversight comes as the agencies slash staff and change policy direction according to the direction of the Trump administration. 
• Forward look: The Senate Banking Committee has a tight calendar until the end of the year, after which some lawmakers who are up for reelection will begin spending time campaigning in their home states. 

WASHINGTON — The Senate Banking Committee hasn’t held its annually required oversight hearing, a fact that Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is raising with the panel’s chairman just as the last legislative days of the year are fast approaching. 

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In a letter to Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., Warren said that the Senate Banking Committee is required to hear from the Fed Vice Chair for Supervision — a position held by Michelle Bowman — on a semiannual basis. Typically, the leaders of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the National Credit Union Administration, also testify alongside the top Fed bank official, Warren said. 

Warren was joined on the letter by fellow committee Democrats Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Andy Kim of New Jersey. 

The last time bank regulators appeared for regular oversight hearing was May 2024, though Bowman, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould and acting Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Travis Hill have each testified in confirmation hearings before the committee in 2025. The banking committee has been more active this year than in prior years, having passed major pieces of legislation like the GENIUS stablecoin act and taking up high-profile banking items like deposit insurance reform. 

The lack of hearing also comes at a particularly active time for the agencies. Like elsewhere in the federal government, the OCC and FDIC have shed staff, and the bank regulators have promised a lighter regulatory touch in some areas, while ramping up enforcement against what they call the political debanking of conservatives. 

“The agencies have spent the last year slashing examination staff and undoing safeguards that ensure our banks and credit unions can survive periods of economic turbulence and continue offering financial services, while limiting the potential for destabilizing failures and taxpayer bailouts,” the Democratic lawmakers said in the letter. 

Time is running short for the Senate Banking Committee to hold the hearing before the end of the year. Scott would have needed to publish notice of the hearing Thursday evening in order to host the hearing before next Thursday, after which lawmakers begin leaving to go back to their districts for the holidays. 

“With only two weeks left in the year, it is critical that you hold this long overdue, statutorily required oversight hearing,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “Conducting oversight of the nation’s banking and credit union regulators is a core responsibility of the Senate Banking Committee.” 

The House Financial Services Committee held its oversight hearing of bank regulators last week. 

Neither committee, however, has done any oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a hearing, despite testimony from the bureau’s leader also being statutorily mandated. Warren and House Financial Services Committee ranking member Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., have both called for those hearings to take place. 

House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill, R-Ark., has said in the past that the committee’s policy isn’t to have acting heads of agencies testify — although FDIC acting Chair Travis Hill spoke at last week’s bank regulator oversight hearing.