Within hours of President Donald Trump nominating new commissioners to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Senate committee responsible for approving the picks had scheduled a hearing for next week.
The turnaround is unusually fast, reflecting the administration's limited window to advance high-priority nominations while Republicans still hold a Senate majority. The party has only a handful of weeks left with control of the chamber. Late Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee updated its calendar to consider several nominations at a November 19 hearing.
Trump's SEC nominees include attorney Steven Levine, who has served as a senior lawyer at the Department of Labor and as deputy chief of staff to current Commissioner Mark Uyeda, and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Kristin Johnson. Since leaving the CFTC, Johnson, a Democrat, has been a professor at George Washington University School of Law.
Alongside the two SEC nominees, the White House nominated two potential CFTC commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican: Nathan Anonick, a Republican staffer for the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Democrat Matthew Rowland, who served on Johnson's CFTC staff.
The Senate Agriculture Committee, which would also need to approve Trump's CFTC nominees, has not yet scheduled a hearing.
Committee Chairman John Boozman "welcomes these nominations and looks forward to holding a hearing soon,", a spokesperson said in an email.
The nomination of Democrats is unusual for an administration that has otherwise sought to remove opposition-party members from regulatory commissions and boards. Since the start of last year, the White House had allowed both the SEC and CFTC to shrink to only Republican members: two at the SEC and one at the CFTC, Chairman Mike Selig.
Regulatory nominees have traditionally often been put forward from both parties at once to ease confirmation, with each party having a nominee to support. In this case, the seats the nominees would fill are the Democratic vacancies with the shortest time remaining in their current terms.
