Elizabeth Warren Could Be at the Height of Her Power in the New Congress — and Wall Street Knows It
Elizabeth Warren has criticized Wall Street for decades. In January, Reuters reports, the Massachusetts senator is widely expected to chair the Senate Banking Committee — with subpoena power, a bigger staff, and an agenda that starts with a Trump-backed crypto charter, the consumer bureau she helped create, and the executives she has grilled before.
Democratic progressive Elizabeth Warren has long been a vocal Wall Street critic, but next year the senator from Massachusetts will likely have more power over the industry than ever before, Reuters reported Friday. As the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Warren is widely expected to become its chair when Democrats take over Congress in January, handing her more staff and the power to issue subpoenas, demand testimony and advance legislation — scrutiny that big banks, consumer lenders, private equity firms and crypto companies, which she has long accused of fleecing consumers, are already preparing for. “You're going to see a lot of investigations,” Brian Gardner, chief Washington policy strategist at Stifel, told Reuters.
The first targets are already visible from New York's trading floors. Warren will likely probe the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's August decision to approve a bank charter for President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial, one person familiar with her thinking told Reuters, and she is likely to investigate the administration's mass firings of financial-agency workers and its attempts to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency she helped create after the 2008 financial crisis. The administration is pushing back in advance: a CFPB spokesperson told Reuters, “We are fixing that,” arguing the bureau overregulated lenders, and a White House spokesperson said Trump is willing to work with anyone on behalf of Americans but that “sham investigations and radical left policies” would undermine any such effort.
Warren's record says the hearings would not be theater. A former Harvard law professor who studied bankruptcy before helping the Obama administration set up the CFPB, she won her Senate seat in 2012 and, following her pressure in 2021, big banks cut overdraft fees; former Wells Fargo chief executives John Stumpf and Tim Sloan both resigned after hearings in which Warren questioned them over the bank's scandals, Reuters recounts. She also works across the aisle where she chooses: this year she helped steer passage of bipartisan housing affordability legislation and co-sponsored bills with Republicans restricting shipments of advanced chips and other technology overseas. “I'm ready to team up with any Republican who is listening to the American people,” she wrote in a Thursday opinion piece in Time magazine, adding in the same piece: “Big Tech CEOs, Wall Street executives, and giant corporations should prepare to answer tough questions.”
Nothing is formal yet — Democrats decide committee roles in the coming weeks, and two or three Democratic senators could in theory rank ahead of Warren for the chairmanship, though analysts expect them to take other committee posts, Reuters reported. For the financial industry headquartered a short train ride from the Capitol, in this city, the practical question is not whether the scrutiny arrives but how much of it lands in the first hundred days of the new Congress. “She has never hidden her agenda,” James Ballentine, a former American Bankers Association lobbyist, told Reuters. “I don't foresee a moderation of her views.”
