WASHINGTON, March 3, 2016 - President Obama has nominated a law professor with expertise in regulating financial markets to fill one of two vacancies on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 

The nominee, Chris Brummer, director of the Institute for International Economic Law at Georgetown University, appears to lack the agricultural background that agribusiness interests and some lawmakers have been  pushing the White House to add to the CFTC. 

Brummer, who has been at Georgetown since 2009, finished a three-year term in 2015 on the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. He served as an academic fellow in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of International Affairs in 2008. 

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Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts responded to Brummer’s nomination by pressing the case for having someone with an agricultural knowledge on the commission. 

“For the CFTC to effectively function for all stakeholders, we must make sure nominees have a solid understanding of agriculture and prioritize the folks who use the futures and derivatives markets to manage risk,” Roberts said. 

Roberts said that reenacting a reauthorization bill for the CFTC would be “useless” if its commissioners “don’t comprehend how their decisions impact end-users, especially agriculture producers.”

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Brummer has been the C. Boyden Gray fellow and project director for the Transatlantic Finance Initiative at the Atlantic Council since 2012 and  senior fellow in the Center for Financial Markets at the Milken Institute since 2011. 

The CFTC is currently operating with three commissioners. Mark P. Wetjen left the agency last August, and Scott O’Malia’s term ended in 2014. 

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