Exclusive: Warren says OCC rule limits oversight to 5 banks

• Key insight: Sen. Elizabeth Warren says a proposed rule from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would lift its strictest oversight standards from all but five U.S. banks, fewer than the agency’s estimate of eight. 
• What’s at stake: Warren’s push on deregulation is growing in importance as Republicans’ control of both chambers of Congress is looking increasingly in peril. 
• Forward look: The OCC is unlikely to withdraw the rule as Warren demands, but her letter signals that progressive Democrats will keep pressure on bank regulators if they retake the House and/or the Senate after this year’s midterm elections. 

WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that a proposed rule would roll back oversight for all but the very largest banks. 

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The OCC at the end of last year said that it would raise the asset threshold for banks subject to heightened standards from $50 billion to $700 billion. The OCC said at the time that this would reduce the number of banks subject to more stringent oversight to eight, from 38 institutions. 

Warren, in a letter sent to the agency on Thursday, calculated that the OCC’s changes, in sum, would exempt all but five banks from the heightened oversight, from a current total of 31. 

The OCC’s proposal would let large regional banks — the kinds of institutions that struggled in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank — bypass the OCC’s most strict oversight regime, Warren said. 

“This proposal ignores the serious risks posed by big banks with between $50 billion and $700 billion in assets,” she said in the letter. “Just three years ago the second, third, and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history were banks at the lower end of this size range. These firms proved to be systemically important, requiring an extraordinary government rescue of uninsured depositors of over $20 billion and a Federal Reserve liquidity backstop of over $160 billion to prevent broader contagion.” 

The OCC said at the time the agency proposed the rule that the heightened standards “may only be justified for the largest and most complex institutions as their size, complexity, and risk profile pose the greatest risk to financial stability and the banking system.” 

Warren said in the letter that the SVB crisis means that the proposed rule “fails to align with reality and recent history.” 

Warren called in the letter for the OCC to withdraw its rule, which is highly unlikely. It does, however, signal that there will be continued Democratic pressure on the issue, even as some Democrats soften their stance toward other financial topics. That pressure could become more acute if Democrats win both the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterm elections, an outcome that is increasingly in play.