Report: Treasury Department Seeks More Control Over FDIC and OCC

The Treasury Department is reportedly drafting recommendations that would streamline other banking regulators and give the department more control over them.

Treasury began drafting these regulations after concluding that the regulators — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — probably cannot be merged without congressional approval, Semafor reported Monday (March 24), citing unnamed sources.

The Treasury Department did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Officials at Treasury are expected to finalize the recommendations within weeks, according to the report.

Gaining more control over the other banking regulators would also help Treasury reduce the independence of the Federal Reserve when it comes to bank supervision by enabling Treasury to take the lead on multiagency laws that affect the country’s biggest banks, according to the report.

It was reported March 6 that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addressed media reports that the Trump administration was considering consolidating the federal banking agencies, saying during a speech at The Economic Club of New York: “We need our financial regulators singing in unison from the same song sheet. To be clear, this does not mean consolidation of agencies, but coordination via Treasury, such that our regulators work in parallel with each other and industry.”

Bessent said that he agreed with the banking industry that federal regulators’ bank supervision is opaque, subjective and needlessly restrictive; that he plans to use the Financial Stability Oversight Council and similar multiagency bodies to coordinate regulatory activities; and that a recent executive order from President Donald Trump allowed the administration to oversee the rule-writing of independent agencies.

The FDIC, like other regulatory agencies, is rapidly being reshaped and may see the very structure of the agency altered, PYMNTS reported March 5.

The FDIC’s new acting chairman, Travis Hill, laid out an ambitious agenda at the start of the new administration in January, saying he would “conduct a wholesale review of regulations, guidance and manuals” and “adopt a more open-minded approach to innovation and technology adoption, including (1) a more transparent approach to fintech partnerships and to digital assets and tokenization, and (2) engagement to address growing technology costs for community banks.”