NCUA ended 2025 in legal and operational limbo. That uncertainty is quickly becoming a governance story credit unions can’t ignore.
During Thursday’s holiday edition of "Inside the PRO Studio", CU Times Editor-in-Chief Michael Ogden opened bluntly: “NCUA has had a hell of a year,” pointing to the second Trump administration’s firing of board members Todd Harper and Tanya Otsuka, major staff reductions, and an agency now operating with a one-person board.
Ogden was joined by credit union attorney Henry Meier, Esq. who walked PRO members through how the Harper-Otsuka lawsuit began, why a lower-court ruling briefly allowed the two to return for a single meeting, and how an appellate administrative stay has since frozen that decision. This has left the NCUA’s structure “frozen in time” while the courts wait for a Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, a Federal Trade Commission case that could reshape presidential removal power across independent agencies.
Meier said NCUA’s statute is unusually vulnerable because it doesn’t explicitly state “for-cause” removal protections, which he called a “bizarre oversight” dating to the three-member board’s creation in 1970s. The result: open questions about legitimacy, quorum authority, and whether one board member can promulgate new rules, even as Chairman Kyle Hauptman pursues a sweeping deregulation “spring cleaning.”
The episode closed with a forward-looking warning: regardless of outcome, credit unions should prepare for more regulatory whiplash, and keep one eye on what happens next at the CFPB.
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