The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has new executives to its regulatory and enforcement staffs, as well as other divisions within the agency.
The five new executives come to the bureau with a wide array of experience levels relevant to their appointed positions.
Thomas Ward has been appointed to be the CFPB’s assistant director of enforcement in the Supervision, Enforcement and Fair Lending Division, according to a press release. Ward comes to the bureau from Department of Justice’s civil division where he served as deputy assistant attorney general.
Ward takes over the head of enforcement role following Kristen Donoghue’s resignation in May 2019. The role had been filled in an acting capacity since by Cara Peterson.
Prior to joining the Justice Department, Ward was a litigation partner at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., focusing on financial and securities litigation and investigations. He also previously worked as a corporate associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City.
The CFPB has appointed Susan Bernard to serve as its new assistant director for regulations in the bureau’s Research, Markets and Regulation Division. Bernard previously was the director of the Office of Regulations and Policy at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Bernard’s past experience, as indicated by the release or her LinkedIn profile, does not include any positions pertaining to finance.
David Wernecke will become the CFPB’s new chief experience officer, what is believed to be a newly created position within the Operations division, having worked at the bureau since 2013. Most recently, he served as the section chief in the Consumer Response Product Office. He has more than 20 years of executive experience in the financial services industry and five years of experience in management consulting supporting federal agencies.
The CFPB’s operations division received two new additions – Donna Roy and Rachelle Vaughan.
Roy will serve as the bureau’s new chief information officer. Most recently during her 18-year federal government career, she served as executive director of information sharing and services office at the Department of Homeland Security – an agency where CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger worked before joining the Office of Management and Budget and, eventually, the CFPB. Roy focused on innovative solutions for identity management, national scale collaboration and trust platforms and scalable data infrastructure solutions to customers within a dynamic environment.
Vaughan will bring her 11 years of federal experience as she takes over as the CFPB’s chief procurement officer. Before joining the bureau, she served as director of procurement services for the corporation at the National and Community Service where she oversaw the agency’s entire acquisition portfolio.
The CFPB also lost one of its longest-tenured rule-writers, according to a report by Bloomberg Law citing five current and former officials.
David Silberman, associate CFPB director for Research, Markets and Regulations, was expected to leave the bureau Friday. Silberman has been with the CFPB since before its official launch in 2011.
Silberman served as the bureau’s acting deputy director in 2016 and remained in that position until former Director Richard Cordray resigned, Nov. 24, 2017. When Cordray named Leandra English deputy director that same day, Silberman went back to exclusively overseeing the regulations division.
Had Cordray not appointed English deputy director prior to leaving, the role would have been passed to Silberman in accordance with the Dodd-Frank Act’s short succession line. If that scenario had played out, Silberman conceivably may have been at the center of the CFPB leadership controversy that occurred when President Donald Trump invoked the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to appoint Mick Mulvaney as acting director.