The CFTC nominee representing the Democrats is an adviser to the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The White House has nominated a New Jersey Democrat to fill a commissioner vacancy on the five-person CFTC, which has been operating with only two members for some time.
The nomination requires U.S. Senate confirmation. The nominee, Russ Behnam, is senior counsel to Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow, ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, according to his biography, which was included in the 2016 Animal Biotech Summit.
At the Biotech Summit, Behnam and James Glueck, Jr., senior policy advisor to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, spoke jointly on the subject of “Advice on Working with Congress.”
Now Behnam is part of a group of 10 Trump administration nominees sent last week for the necessary U.S. Senate confirmation. The CFTC term for which he is nominated expires June 19, 2021.
In addition to the Behnam nomination to the CFTC, the Trump White House has proposed adding Republicans Brian Quintenz, a former House aide, and Dawn Stump, a derivatives lobbyist and former staffer on the Senate Agriculture Committee, according to MarketWatch, among others.
Current CFTC Commissioner Sharon Bowen, a Democrat, has announced her intention to step down. Christopher Giancarlo, a commissioner since 2014 and acting CFTC chairman since the advent of the current administration, has been nominated to become CFTC chairman. Giancarlo is widely expected to win Senate approval.
Commissioner spots on the CFTC, created in the mid-1970s to regulate futures markets, are divided between Democrats and Republicans, with its chairman picked by the president. “Trump’s nominees are likely to reflect his staunch opposition to regulatory intervention in financial markets in their policymaking,” The Hill website opined last year.
Not surprisingly in an ideologically divided country, moves toward deregulation, whether at the CFTC or elsewhere, have inspired sometimes bitter controversy. To put the overarching question simply, is deregulation “draining the swamp,” is it eliminating “job-killing regulations” that have hobbled American business, or does a presidentially inspired campaign aimed at financial deregulation risk another financial crisis?
Before joining the CFTC in 2014, Chairman-to-be Giancarlo served as the executive vice president of GFI Group Inc., an interdealer brokerage, a 2016 FTF News report observed, noting also that before GFI, Giancarlo was executive vice president and U.S. legal counsel for Fenics Software and a corporate partner in the New York law firm of Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner.
“During his time as acting chairman, Giancarlo has worked with [Commissioner] Bowen to ‘advance 74 formal Commission actions, roughly one action for every two days,’ FTF News reported, citing the CFTC as a source. “These actions include the launch of new initiatives such as LabCFTC and Project KISS [keep it simple stupid], creating the new Market Intelligence Branch and the role of chief market intelligence officer and taking swift action on more than 20 important enforcement cases.”
Since joining the staff of the Agriculture Committee in 2011, Behnam has been an adviser to Stabenow “on all policy and legislative issues regarding agricultural biotechnology and crop protection issues, the CFTC, and executive nominations,” according to The Fence Post, which characterizes itself as a nationwide agricultural newspaper reaching more than 80,000 readers each week.
“During the 2014 farm bill debate, Benham acted as legal counsel for the research, rural development, and forestry titles of the bill,” the agricultural trade paper adds.
In a statement reported by The Fence Post, Congressperson Stabenow framed the Behnam confirmation as being “essential” to providing the strong CFTC leadership necessary to “ensure our financial markets are working for farmers, businesses, and consumers,” and she says, “Russ Behnam has a wide range of experience that would make him an excellent CFTC commissioner. Over the past several years I have known Russ, he has proven to be knowledgeable and judicious, especially through his work on the implementation of Dodd-Frank.”
Last year’s Biotech Summit, at which Behnam spoke, focused on recent developments in the fields of genetically modified organisms and foods, promised to “provide broad overviews of some of the animal health, biomedical research, biotherapeutics, food safety and security, and environmental applications of biotechnology.”
The Summit was sponsored by such companies as Exemplar Genetics, which specializes in “miniature swine models that are genetically engineered to exhibit a wide variety of human disease states, to provide a more accurate platform to test the efficacy of new medications and devices,” and Trans Ova Genetics, which specializes in “reproductive technologies and expertise to breeders of cattle and small ruminants.”
Whether Behnam will prove to be an ideologue or a technocrat on the CFTC remains to be seen, but Senate oversight makes it more likely that he will asked at his confirmation hearing to explain his thoughts about the relationship between the science of genetic engineering, with all its promise and perils, and the philosophy of deregulation.
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