Whether or not President Joe Biden is attempting to hasten America’s transformation to a socialist workers’ paradise by design or as a matter of political expediency is a matter for speculation. Motivation aside, his nomination of Saule Omarova as comptroller of the currency is as revealing as it is troubling.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency doesn’t garner much publicity, but in the wrong hands, it can be used to strangle economic growth. Under the Obama administration, the comptroller’s office targeted specific types of loans and passed rules to try to prevent banks from making them. Omarova’s history indicates she is exactly the type of nominee who would abuse the comptroller position.
She graduated in 1989 from Moscow State University on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, which wasn’t exactly awarded to enemies of the Soviet state. She moved to the United States in 1991 to continue in academia. True to her ideological roots, she spent years churning out papers imagining private businesses and innovation as the root of all evil while advocating for a command economy controlled by bureaucrats working for Big Brother.
This isn’t hyperbolic rhetoric. Omarova’s academic writings betray an unhealthy obsession with centralized planning and economic management. In a recent paper, Omarova argues that “the Fed’s entire balance sheet should be redesigned to operate as what it calls the ‘People’s Ledger:’ the ultimate public platform for both modulating and allocating the flow of sovereign credit and money in the national economy.” Despite sounding like a high-minded attempt to “democratize” finance, what she is really proposing is raw, unchecked government power over the economy.
She has also called for the creation of a National Investment Authority, which would be “a public entity that would design, execute, and finance a comprehensive nationwide program of environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive growth and revival.” Omarova’s NIA could spend large sums of money on climate change free of any congressional approval or oversight. This proposal sounds like something straight out of the Soviet Union with an elite, unelected apparatchik spending taxpayer dollars without accountability.
What underlies Omarova’s proposals is contempt for free-market innovation and change not initiated by the state-anointed intelligentsia. She holds these forces to be negative disruptors that central planners should carefully manage to protect investors. She argues, “The sheer scale and complexity of the financial market effectively ‘liberated’ from exogenously imposed constraints on its growth will make it inherently more volatile and unstable.” One can conclude that her fear of change is why she advocates for collectivization and wants the government to create a central cryptocurrency to cut Bitcoin off at the knees.
While many of Omarova’s priorities would be difficult to impossible to implement from the comptroller’s office, she can be expected to use her authority to hamstring banks. That would almost certainly include new regulations aimed at those bulwarks of capitalism, with increased enforcement measures leveled against any financial institution that doesn’t enthusiastically cooperate with her agenda, much like what the Obama administration did. But if Omarova believes the American economy would benefit from centralized banking in the mold of the New Economic Policy, she is mistaken.
Those who think criticism of Omarova as being a socialist is off the mark should judge her by her own words on Twitter in 2019: “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” And let’s not pretend that Biden officials didn’t see that. She has been fully vetted. Either she represents the administration’s views and philosophy or the administration is willing to overlook her views to placate the leadership within the Democratic Party’s far-left wing.
Either of those scenarios should scare the public. Biden is either embracing efforts to centralize much of the economy and banking industry or is knowingly nominating a person unfit for office in order to soothe intraparty political tensions. The latter option seems plausible because left-wing Democrats torpedoed a previous nominee whom they judged too centrist.
Biden’s appointment of Omarova positions him as advocating an agenda and ideology long consigned to the ash heap of history and so objectionable to nonfringe voters that his ability to make sound judgments may be called into question. Democrats and Republicans must set aside their differences to reject Omarova’s nomination and demand that the president stop appointing radicals to critical financial positions.
David McIntosh is president of the Club for Growth.
