But when the boss’s temper becomes so uncontrollable that employees avoid interacting with him, that’s a different matter. This was the case with Gruenberg, the Journal’s Ballhaus reported, and the independent commission went further, suggesting Gruenberg’s temper made employees especially reluctant to disagree with him or deliver bad news:
A number of executives … noted that, although it ultimately did not prevent them from reporting news as necessary, staffers fretted about and delayed delivering news that they feared would upset Chairman Gruenberg, and that his reactions did have a “chilling impact” on open communications.
Like, for example, information about the agency’s problem with sexual harassment? I find unpersuasive the cited executives’ caveat that they never, ultimately, withheld information from Gruenberg. What executive would ever admit to keeping the boss in the dark? A central tenet of my beloved screaming mentor, Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters, was that organizations die when the bad news doesn’t travel up. That seems to be the case here.
Dismissing Gruenberg creates some difficulties. If Biden fires him (unlike at other regulatory agencies, there are no legal obstacles to him doing so), Gruenberg will be replaced by the vice chair, Travis Hill, a Trump appointee who has voted against higher capital standards for banks and, according to an article Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect published last November, frequently “parroted industry talking points.” Kuttner isn’t the only one to observe that the FDIC, which once operated in a fairly collegial and reassuringly boring manner, has become yet another battlefield where hyper-partisan Republicans wage total war. “According to my sources,” Kuttner wrote, “many of the details in the Journal piece began with tips fed to the Journal reporter by Republican FDIC officials and holdover staff.”
