If you love junk fees, higher interest rates, fewer banking options, and all the other documented effects of bank mergers, then you (along with bank lobbyists) will likely love President Donald Trump’s new pick to run the nation’s consumer protection agency.

On Tuesday, Trump announced the new chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the consumer watchdog agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis: Jonathan McKernan, a former banking regulator who’s pushed to approve bank megamergers that harm consumers and that the CFPB has actively fought to prevent.

Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies are freezing the agency’s operations and threatening to cut off its funding. As workers remain shut out of their offices, McKernan will now helm the agency — or what’s left of it.

During his recent tenure on the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insures and regulates banks, McKernan pushed regulators to more quickly approve bank mergers and voted against a landmark measure increasing scrutiny of massive bank consolidations and adding new protections for bank customers.

In March 2024, McKernan voiced his opposition to an early version of those protections: “I opposed [the policy] because it appeared to reflect a bias against bank mergers,” he explained in a later public statement.

Bank megamergers, research has found, lead to higher fees and higher minimum balance requirements for consumers. These consolidated banks also are more likely to fail, federal regulators argue, harming their customers and potentially setting off a broader economic tailspin. Lower competition among big banks can also decrease small-business lending and harm economic development.

Rohit Chopra, McKernan’s CFPB predecessor, supported the bank merger reform measure, which was enacted last September. Past regulators, Chopra has said, “completely defied” mandates to oversee banking mergers, “giving banks free rein to merge and concentrate resources in a few big cities” and enabling Wall Street to take advantage of consumers.

While Chopra’s big bank crackdowns led JPMorgan Chase’s CEO to promise a “knife fight” with the consumer watchdog agency, the banking lobby feels differently about McKernan. On Wednesday, the American Banking Association, the industry’s primary lobbying arm, released a statement saying that the organization was “hopeful that McKernan’s nomination marks an important turning point for the Bureau.”