As Gary Gensler’s tenure as a Wall Street regulator draws to a close, the White House has begun to vet a senior Treasury Department official as a potential replacement.
Timothy G. Massad, an assistant secretary of the Treasury, is among those under consideration to succeed Mr. Gensler as leader of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to people briefed on the matter. And Mr. Massad, who oversees financial stability issues at Treasury, has expressed interest in the job, one of the people said.
But the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel issues, cautioned that the vetting was preliminary. The White House is considering at least two other candidates and has not reached a decision on who will replace Mr. Gensler, who is required to leave office at the end of the year, when his term extension expires.
Names of other potential successors, however, have emerged only to fade away. Amanda Renteria, a former Goldman Sachs employee and Senate aide, was briefly mentioned but was seen as a more likely candidate to become a Democratic commissioner at the agency.
It is unclear when the White House will make a decision on the chairman spot. If it declines to do so by January, one of the agency’s Democratic commissioners could fill the role on an interim basis.
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.
As recently as September, the White House asked Mr. Gensler to serve a second term, the people briefed on the matter said. But Mr. Gensler, who overhauled the agency from one of Wall Street’s laxest regulators into one of its feistiest, balked at the offer.
He told colleagues that he believed a departure in December would come at a natural transition point. The agency, which he has run since 2009, has completed nearly every new rule for derivatives trading that it inherited under the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress passed in response to the financial crisis.
His exit would also coincide with the departure of David Meister, the agency’s enforcement chief, who announced this week that he would soon leave. Mr. Meister and Mr. Gensler are leaving the agency after filing a record number of actions against the financial industry. The agency most notably cracked down on the banking industry’s manipulation of benchmark interest rates, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from big banks like UBS and Barclays.
The shake-up at the agency traces to Mr. Gensler’s unapologetic advocacy of Dodd-Frank. The law broadened the responsibility of the agency, stretching its reach to the dark corners of the $300 trillion derivatives market at the center of the financial crisis. Until recently, the agency oversaw the $40 trillion futures business.
Mr. Gensler’s approach to Dodd-Frank made him few friends on Wall Street. He routinely rebuffed the demands of financial lobbyists and Congressional Republicans, who contended that the agency was overstepping its authority.
Mr. Massad is less of a lightning rod. And the Senate already confirmed him to be an assistant Treasury secretary in 2011. The role requires Mr. Massad to oversee the wind-down of the government’s bank bailout program stemming from the financial crisis.
Before arriving at Treasury in 2009, he worked for the Congressional Oversight Panel, a watchdog group assigned to keep an eye on the bailout. That experience might appeal to lawmakers who were skeptical of the government’s efforts to save Wall Street during the depths of the crisis.
Mr. Massad, who received his bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard, also has corporate experience. Before his government work, Mr. Massad was a partner at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which represents many of the Wall Street banks.
While being a corporate lawyer might project a certain sympathy to Wall Street, Mr. Gensler’s tenure suggests that is not always the case. Mr. Gensler joined the agency after a long career at Goldman Sachs and a stint in the Wall Street-friendly Clinton administration.
