Interview: Rep. Bill Huizenga’s case to chair the Financial Services Committee
“It’s not my job to be friends with regulators," he said in an extensive interview. "It's to hold them accountable.” We also discuss his beloved Detroit Lions.
Rep. Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.) has served on every Financial Services Committee (FSC) subcommittee — and next Congress, he wants to run the committee, he told the Washington Reporter in an interview.
Huizenga, who praised President Donald Trump’s economic cabinet nominees as “smart, highly qualified, loyal people who have an understanding of the legislative process but who are not afraid to massively shake it up as needed,” has seen the crippling effects that regulations can have on small businesses like his family’s own in real estate — and he has plans to roll back a series of Biden-era regulations.
“First and foremost, have got to start with cleanup on aisle three,” he said. “This has been a huge problem having Gary Gensler, Rohit Chopra, the FDIC, sort of alphabet soup of all the regulators who have been really hampering our ability to grow everything from the climate disclosure rule that we did a tremendous amount of work on, which even the SEC has realized they needed to pause.”
Huizenga wants the new Republican majority to “put bureaucracies back in the proper box that they have and not just allow them to go and make legislation, essentially, and other rules…I would love to put CFPB on budget. I would love to separate the Federal Reserve from the regulator side, from the monetary policy side. Those are two very different hats that they wear. I'd love to basically make sure that we have a proper balance again; I think we're out of balance of what legislative intent is.”
After his high-profile investigations from his perch on the FSC’s oversight subcommittee into instances of corruption, such as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the career of Sam Bankman-Fried, Huizenga’s diagnosis for what ails America’s financial system is “the regulators.”
“You've got regulators coming in and trying to micromanage the portfolios and business of bankers,” he said. “We’ve got to straighten that kind of stuff up, and we need to let businesspeople in, whether it's insurance or whether it's banks or whatever it might be, we have to allow those folks, to make business decisions for business reasons, not for regulatory reasons.”
Some of his work, especially with investigating a culture of sexual harassment at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), hasn’t made Huizenga popular with Biden appointees such as FDIC Chair Marty Gruenberg, but he is at peace with that.
“It’s not my job to be friends with regulators,” he said. “It's to hold them accountable.” Over the past Congress, Huizenga has repeatedly sparred with Gruenberg and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler.
That desire for accountability animates much of his view on spending. Huizenga, who introduced the Fiscal Commission Act, said that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a sound idea, as long as Congress doesn’t abdicate its role. “I would love to see the game plan as to how we cut $2 trillion without Congress even being involved,” he said, citing the “over 70 percent of our federal spending [that is] on autopilot. I never vote on it. None of my colleagues vote on it. Nobody in the Senate votes on it. Nobody in the White House signs off on it. It just happens. And I suspect that DOGE is not going to be able to do that on its own.” Huizenga wants “legislative involvement and engagement” with DOGE.
In addition to leaning on his own family business’s experience with the financial system, Huizenga’s experience on the Foreign Affairs Committee has helped him as well.
“Treasury and the State Department would essentially come in and kind of pat everybody on the head and say ‘don't worry your pretty little head about all these complicated sanctioning things, we've got a handle on it,’” he said. In response, “we kind of go, ‘well, we actually wrote it. So what is happening? Why is $12 billion getting moved from Korea into an Omani bank? Why did you grant a licensed Treasury for Iranian oil to be on a tanker?’”
Huizenga’s goals are impossible for him to achieve without a team. The Reporter previously covered how Huizenga has donated over $10 million to efforts to elect Republicans since he was first elected. He draws on the successes of his beloved Detroit Lions for inspiration; the Lions are potentially Super Bowl-bound despite placing many star players on season-ending injured reserve.
“You have to dig in and take on the tough stuff, do the hard things,” he said. “You may not always win the game or make the 4th down and two point conversion but you will know you didn’t cheat yourself or your team. Even Super Bowl-bound teams lose a couple of games, or just one game, but the ultimate prize is to deliver a winning season.”
Huizenga, who has scored a series of high profile wins in the GOP’s war against ESG, reflected on the progress he and his committee have made so far. “The ship might be turning, but we’ve got to keep that wheel cranked and we've got to keep the power on to hit the apex and to actually turn the corner and not give up on it,” he added.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Bill Huizenga, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Huizenga, you are running to chair the Financial Services Committee. What are your top priorities? Unified Republican control will hopefully make things a little bit easier for you next Congress.
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
It absolutely will. And we, first and foremost, have got to start with cleanup on aisle three. This has been a huge problem having Gary Gensler, Rohit Chopra, the FDIC, sort of alphabet soup of all the regulators who have been really hampering our ability to grow everything from the climate disclosure rule that we did tremendous amount of work on, which even the SEC has realized they needed to pause. It's going to be very important to see who's going to be head of FDIC? Who's going to be head of SEC? It looks like Paul Atkins now, which is great. What's going to happen with Rohit Chopra at CFPB? So we've got some damage control that we have to do. We need to put a spike through Basel III and make sure that that doesn't resurrect itself again. Additionally, we have to think about what are these emerging technologies going to look like? Crypto obviously has gotten a lot of lot more exposure over the last couple of years. I remember taking my first crypto meeting probably 13 years ago, and it was kind of like, ‘okay, let me follow this,’ right? And it's just become so much more a part of the lexicon and what people are doing, but not everybody necessarily understands what it actually does and what it means, the distributive ledger and that kind of thing, and what the technology separate from the product means, and then the emergence of AI is going to have a huge impact. So we don't know necessarily what those end games are going to look like yet, and regardless of who's chair, regardless of who's in the White House, regardless of who's in control, those are issues that aren't going to go away and we're going to have to deal with. I'm glad it's Republicans in charge of all three, because I think our philosophy surrounding this is very different and much better. And we have more consensus than Democrats do, who have the Elizabeth Warren-Brad Sherman wing and the Ritchie Torres wing. The Richie Torreses of the world very much understand that this is the future. And that might be the one thing that I agree with anyone on the squad about is, which is that this is an emerging technology that's a reality, and you can't just back away from it, which is what Warren and others want to do. So those are going to be some big issues that we're going to be having, and then, more proactively, what are we going to do to pull power back out of the bureaucracy, into the legislature and put these things into statute so that the bureaucracy is more limited and is more constrained? I think that's been the story over the last couple of years of with West Virginia vs. EPA starting this snowball with Chevron and major doctrines questions and some of those things coming out of the Supreme Court, but even lower courts, we just saw it with a Texas court that is putting a stay on the beneficial ownership disclosures. We've got to put bureaucracies back in the proper box that they have and not just allow them to go and make legislation, essentially, and other rules. So I want to codify that. I want to figure out our ways that we're going to be able to. I would love to put CFPB on budget. I would love to separate the Federal Reserve from the regulator side, from the monetary policy side. Those are two very different hats that they wear. I'd love to basically make sure that we have a proper balance again; I think we're out of balance of what legislative intent is.
Washington Reporter:
What do you make of Trump’s economic cabinet picks?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
I think his picks have been very solid so far, just as I expected. President Trump needs smart but loyal people pushing his agenda. Between the Russia hoax and some appointees who really didn’t buy into the president’s agenda, it was a rougher start last time than it will be this time around. His picks for the part of government that most effects our work on FSC have been excellent. I don’t know Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent well, but he has an excellent reputation among those who have worked with him. I’ve worked with Paul Atkins for a number of years on some great issues and I know he will be a massive breath of fresh air at the SEC. And as President Trump appoints the other regulators and chairs, I expect the same: smart, highly qualified, loyal people who have an understanding of the legislative process but who are not afraid to massively shake it up as needed. And it is needed!
Washington Reporter:
We’ve covered your extensive donations to House Republicans; how has that helped you in this race?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
First and most importantly, we are in the majority. I lived through both majority and minority in both the state House and here in the U.S. House. There are no gavels to be had in the minority. As for my long term help to others, over my entire career — from the Upper Hand Fund, my NRCC participation, and with events like my Beers with Bill series, I have shown I’m a team player who is there for others. I mainly focus on vulnerable FSC members and my subcommittee members first. I then move further out to “majority makers” from across the conference. All of those things build long term relationships that help with passing legislation, etc.
Washington Reporter:
You have been on every Subcommittee on the Financial Services Committee, right?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
Been on every subcommittee, the only one I technically haven’t been on would be the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion. But I was on the working group that created the Digital Assets one because I was the ranker on the Subcommittee on Capital Markets that housed all the crypto and all the digital assets. So, yes.
Washington Reporter:
How does that broad view of FSC inform how you want to run the actual full committee itself?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
My background is actually in real estate and developing and that kind of thing. And I've had a couple of opportunities to run the Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, and I chose to not do that because that was an area that I was very familiar with already, and some work that I had done in the state legislature, both on housing and insurance, focused on that and I wanted to get challenged, and in having that opportunity in my third term to be chair of the Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee, here I am, I'm four years into being a member of Congress, and I'm debating PhD economists across the table.
Washington Reporter:
That was unfair to the PhD economists, I would argue.
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
I do have my BA in Political Science, and actually I'm a small business owner, which means I'm like three steps ahead of them when it comes to real world practical outcomes. Every step of the way I’ve wanted to push myself and expand my knowledge base, and not necessarily just be comfortable. I wanted to know more about those unexplored areas that I was not familiar with. And the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, while it was not necessarily my choice to go to initially, I'm very thankful that I've had this opportunity over the last two years, because we have been able to touch virtually every single regulator, from the FDIC, to the CFPB, to the SEC, to the FHFA with housing issues. We have been involved with investigating bank failures. Silicon Valley Bank, outright fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried, we've really been able to get in there, and the FDIC, Marty Grunberg, the SEC, with Gary Gensler. I think Marty hates me even more than Gensler does. But that's okay. It’s not my job to be friends with regulators. It's to hold them accountable. I think the opportunities that have availed themselves, we've taken advantage of, and maximized them. I’ve serve on the Financial Institutions Subcommittee. We worked and cooperated with every other subcommittee chair as well.
Washington Reporter:
How does your experience in your own family small business help make sure that, from the Financial Services Committee, you don't leave Main Street behind in the economy of 2025 and beyond?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
I'll give you a specific example. I actually told a group this story this morning. So my family had been banking with the same local bank for generations. Literally, I have deposit slips from when my grandfather started the business in the 1930s, and fastforward, we've done a couple of real estate developments. We had done expansion of the ready mix company, we had done expansion of the gravel company, bought equipment and all those things. In around 2014, we started talking to our local bank about doing a condominium development, and they were kind of hemming and hawing with us; we’ve got lines of credit, all business accounts with them, all this stuff, personal accounts. And they finally came back with the answer of, ‘well, we're not going to be able to finance your 24 unit condominium project’ on property that we already own. And it begs the question: why not? I mean, we're one of their better customers in a small town of 6,000 people. And the answer was, ‘well, we've been told that we are too heavy on real estate in our portfolio, so we can't take you on with this project.’ So it's the regulators. We had to go find another bank to be able to finance this thing. So we've had no relationship with them, hadn’t worked with them professionally. They were eager to get us, and we started moving accounts over and doing different things with them. The irony in all this, Matthew, is that as we built this thing out, and we were nearing the end of it, through two different acquisitions and consolidations, guess who ended up buying the loan portfolio? The original one that denied us. And they wanted us to get it paid off. How bizarre. So it was our initial bank, Chemical Bank, TCF, and then Huntington ended up buying it, so different acquisitions four different banks later, and this was within six years, we're back with the bank that originally denied us, it makes no damn sense. So that, to me, is a real world example of what is happening when you've got regulators coming in and trying to micromanage the portfolios and business of bankers. We’ve got to straighten that kind of stuff up, and we need to let businesspeople in, whether it's insurance or whether it's banks or whatever it might be, we have to allow those folks, to make business decisions for business reasons, not for regulatory reasons. The productivity out of the regulation, while we have to have a layer of that for consumer protection, simple laws of economics about the law diminishing returns still matter. Just having five regulations doesn't mean that 10 are automatically going to be better, twice as good. It probably means that it's actually diminishing the protection, the efficiency, the effectiveness. That's a real world example that I've had to live through personally.
Washington Reporter:
That ties into your work on the ESG Working Group and the war on ESG that you were a key player in during this past Congress. Where do you see that going in 2025?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
One of my staffers, who is a University of Michigan alum, told me recently that U of M will no longer solicit diversity statements as part of their faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure. You look at what Walmart has done. You look at what all these other major corporations that had this rush to a DEI, ESG, portfolio and footing, and they're finally figuring out that one, their customers don't like it. Two, their customers aren't necessarily benefiting from it, and three, it's actually hurting and harming the business itself. And if you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize your return, you need to execute on that. If I'm hiring Sean as my money manager, and I'm taking my hard earned dollars that I'm dependent on for my retirement, and he's going and playing social experiments with it, and if instead of a 7 percent return, he's giving me a 4 percent return, that's not just a 3 percent difference. That's almost a 50 percent difference in my rate of return. Let's make it easy. Instead of an 8 percent return, he's giving me a 4 percent return. That's 50 percent cut in my returns, and guess what: with the magic of compound interest, after a decade, how much money have I lost to go towards my retirement because he wanted to go over there and have feel good investments and be able to explain it to an institutional investor, that ‘we're being sensitive with how we're using this, or maybe we're not investing in energy stocks, and maybe we're not doing anything with with with a defense company.’ Well, have you really fulfilled your fiduciary responsibility to me, who just hired you to maximize my return? The answer to that is no. And I've been asking this question for a number of years. When is that lawsuit going to happen? Turns out it did happen with CalPERS. There were a couple of teachers who sued CalPERS because they weren't maximizing their return. There is nothing in the law that says if you Matthew Foldi, are going to make the conscious decision that you are not going to invest in any company that doesn't have the right stance on Israel, and you're conscious of that, and you're willing to take a lower return because, because you want to make that social statement knock yourself out. Same thing on the flip side of the coin: environmental, whatever it is, the defense companies. If you are the Little Sisters of whatever, and you don't want to invest in that, you have the right to do that. What’s wrong is when you force everybody else to follow that. And that's what we've been fighting against. And I think we turned the corner in many ways, but I'm not satisfied. The ship might be turning, but we’ve got to keep that wheel cranked and we got to keep the power on to hit the apex and to actually turn the corner and not give up on it. But I take great pride, and I do think we have made a significant impact on the outlook of that by our work.
Washington Reporter:
And what about your Fiscal Commission Act? Where do you see that going with this unified Republican control?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
That's a good question. Hey, I'd love to outsource it to DOGE. That's the thing. I would love to see the game plan as to how we cut $2 trillion without Congress even being involved. The real problem is that we have over 70 percent of our federal spending on autopilot. I never vote on it. None of my colleagues vote on it. Nobody in the Senate votes on it. Nobody in the White House signs off on it. It just happens. And I suspect that DOGE is not going to be able to do that on its own. It's going to need legislative involvement and engagement. In an ideal world, Matthew, Congress would do its job, and we would be able to get our way through this. I've been at this long enough, both recreationally and professionally, to have witnessed us not being able to do that on our own. And much like the notion of how the DoD had to go in and do the BRAC, the Base Realignment Commission, in many ways we have to do that, I'm afraid. We have to. We have to have people willing to take a deep dive who have a risk profile that's higher than others. They need to put together a package and a proposal, and our commission said, ‘look, you're going to get an up or down vote. It's not amendable. We think we got that the language for the Senate to be able to do that as well. We can do that in House more easily,’ but be able to address that on both, is probably going to need some type of version of DOGE.
Washington Reporter:
You think DOGE is an idea whose time has come?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
Yeah, I think there can be a real symbiotic relationship with DOGE and what we're going to have to do.
Washington Reporter:
One of the other things you've done this Congress was put sanctions on Iran,. Where do you see being able to work with the Trump administration on foreign policy issues, like sanctioning the bad guys?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
I think one of the most productive things was having a number of us from Financial Services on Foreign Affairs. So when Treasury and the State Department would essentially come in and kind of pat everybody on the head and say ‘don't worry your pretty little head about all these complicated sanctioning things, we've got a handle on it,’ we kind of go, ‘well, we actually wrote it. So what is happening? Why is $12 billion getting moved from Korea into an Omani bank? Why did you grant a licensed Treasury for Iranian oil to be on a tanker? Oh, by the way, those tend to be ghost fleets that are either changing flags or they're turning off their transponders, they’re untraceable. Why are you allowing this to happen? Not to mention you're dropping off pallets of cash to get around sanction rules saying you can't use a U.S. dollar, so you're going to go use Swiss francs and euros and Japanese yen and every other hard currency under the sun, just so you can get around technical language in the law, you're certainly not abiding by the spirit of the law.’ I've said this all along: if we are not going to enforce it a sanction, there’s no sense in having the sanction. And I think it actually does it counter, because if you are going to lay out a sanction like this and consciously not enforce it, all you've done is encourage bad behavior from people. It's like with your three year old, where it's like, ‘don't do that again. No, I said, No more.’ Well, wait a minute. At some point or another, there has to be a consequence for that. Otherwise it's an empty and hollow threat.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think there's hope to roll back some economic regulations from the Biden administration? One of the ones we've written a lot about is the IRS direct file. Is there hope to be able to get rid of things like that?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
I hope so. I think all of those things are going to need to have a consolidated audit trail. Billy Long at IRS, it's going to be something else. It's going to be fascinating. But, you know, we have to use this moment to probably use CRAs. By the way, that bill up there on my wall is the first bill that Trump signed. That was February 14 of 2017 and it would happen to be my bill dealing with an energy issue. It was a CRA rolling back a rule that the Obama administration had put in place regarding energy exploration through Dodd Frank.
Washington Reporter:
The Detroit Lions have over a dozen players on IR, including stars like Aidan Hutchinson — yet they just clinched the playoffs. What lessons can you learn for FSC and in broader GOP politics from their success?
Rep. Bill Huizenga:
First, it isn’t just the ‘starters’ who can be crucial players on the field. It is a team after all. And frankly, we need to act more like a team for the benefit of the country. That and GRIT. You have to dig in and take on the tough stuff, do the hard things. You may not always win the game or make the 4th down and two point conversion but you will know you didn’t cheat yourself or your team. Even Super Bowl bound teams lose a couple of games, or just one game, but the ultimate prize is to deliver a winning season.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Huizenga, thanks so much and best of luck to you and to the Lions.