The NCUA’s Next Chapter?

Hold this quote in your head as you read on. I’ll give you some context. The person is talking about financial regulations in the United States as compared to the rest of the world.

“The U.S., it’s kind of like a beautiful high-maintenance woman taking off with your man. It has some phenomenal strengths and some weaknesses.”

Before revealing who said these words, let’s take a look back into the NCUA’s history.

Lt. General Herman Nickerson, Jr. died on Dec. 27, 2000. As a highly decorated officer of the United States Marine Corps, he fought and served in many capacities during World War II and the Korean War, and served in two tours of the Vietnam War. In fact, the vast majority of his military service was somewhere in the Asian-Pacific realm of the world.

In 1935, Nickerson graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree from the business school. From there he served in several military roles for nearly four decades.

For his leadership and service during the Korean War, he was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Cross, which is the second highest military award that can be given to anyone serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

In between his time in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Nickerson was the fiscal director of the Marine Corps and president of the American Society of Military Comptrollers.

In 1970, Nickerson was appointed as the first administrator for the newly-formed National Credit Union Administration. He led the agency and its creation of the Share Insurance Fund until 1976.

I think about Lt. General Nickerson Jr. on occasion and mainly I think about how tired he must have been by 1976.

I’ve read a bit about Nickerson over the years and revisited his story recently because of the announcement that President Trump nominated Kyle Hauptman to replace J. Mark McWatters on the NCUA Board, and I wanted to know more about Hauptman’s story.

He was born. When and where I’m not exactly sure.

He worked for Lehman Brothers in Australia as a bond trader when the organization went bankrupt in 2008. According to a blog he wrote on Medium, “I was working for Lehman back then and lost my job, my work visa, and all of my Lehman stock (our pay included stock, which had a 5-year vesting period, and I had worked there for 4.5 years. Good times).”

He worked on Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) 2012 presidential campaign. After that, Hauptman was executive director for the Main Street Growth Project. I’ll explain more about this project later.

He married Kelly Rzendzian in 2017. She works as special assistant to the secretary at the Department of Commerce and also worked at Cambridge Analytica. You know, that firm the Trump campaign hired that collected private information from Facebook? According to Kelly and Kyle’s honeymoon registry (I didn’t know that was a thing), they honeymooned in Tokyo, Bangkok and Bali. You could buy them a “Tuk Tuk Fish Spa” day in Bangkok or a parasailing experience in Bali.

Back to Hauptman. His most recent job, before possibly heading to the NCUA Board, has been serving as Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) economic policy advisor and staff director of the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy.

According to a handful of articles he’s written over the years, Hauptman does not appear to be a fan of President Obama’s economic policies or politics. During a radio interview in September 2016 on the Jim Bohannon Show, Hauptman characterized Obama’s handling of the Great Recession, along with the Dodd-Frank Act, as “a very big government liberal way of handing the financial crisis.”

At the time of the interview, Hauptman was executive director for the above-mentioned Main Street Growth Project. This group, as a 501(c)(4), was formed “to empower Main Street and not to benefit D.C. or Wall Street.” The group promoted itself as an advocate for small businesses. Well, here’s the thing – the group turned out to be funded by some heavy duty conservative organizations; some would call it a “dark money” group. Others might call it a Koch brothers’ side project (because one big funding source was a Koch brothers’ organization). And the Main Street Growth Project’s board of directors and staff were made up of not small business leaders, but some pretty big private equity names … oh, and J. Mark McWatters was on the board of directors too. The group appears to now be defunct. The website URL doesn’t work, and although there is a Facebook Page, the last post was published on Jan. 13, 2017. Google search results don’t turn up much about the organization and I haven’t found the official paperwork of the 501(c)(4).

I transcribed Hauptman’s 2016 interview with Jim Bohannon and yes, that quote you read at the beginning of this column was from Hauptman. According to that interview, Hauptman believes regulations are “holding back the American dream for a lot of people.” He called for “more free enterprise and more competition” because “competition is the solution for most of these problems.”

On Obama and the government bailouts of the Great Recession, he said, “If I was president and I took office and they had just dramatically lowered rates to zero, and six or seven years later they were still at zero? That would be a major red flag to me that something went wrong either in the world or with my administration.”

He said, “You’ve got to make sure that regulation is tailored to the size of the institution.”

I’m sure many credit union leaders will enjoy reading quotes like that.

Will they be comfortable with his comments about women? I’m not, and nor were others when I shared the quote and audio from that interview.

Lt. General Nickerson Jr.’s story was a full picture of hardship, war, failures and lessons. So far, maybe there isn’t enough information about Hauptman, or not enough of a story has been told about him yet. Or maybe we already know plenty.

I look forward to finding out where this story goes.

In the meantime, I hope the happy couple enjoyed the fully-gifted “Nandini Jungle Resort and Spa” in Indonesia.

Michael Ogden is editor-in-chief for CU Times. He can be reached at mogden@cutimes.com.