Donald Trump may be a notoriously lousy credit risk, but the former reality TV star’s newest gig as president of the United States could be a boon to bankers weary of regulatory burden.

A Trump presidency at this point poses more questions than answers on a myriad of policy issues, but industry observers expect Trump to at least clip the wings of both the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The CFPB would be an easy mark, and after all, the president-elect has made no secret of his contempt for its champion, Elizabeth Warren, often taking to Twitter to excoriate the Massachusetts senator as “goofy.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the Republicans are going to go after it and either try to completely neuter it or eliminate it,” said Donald J. Musso, president and CEO of the New Jersey-based consulting firm FinPro. In Musso’s view, that would be a welcome change from the previous administration, during which the pendulum swung toward heavily consumer protectionist policies.

“All indications are that he’s going to take a hard look at overregulation. More than any other candidate – and I would include the Senate and the House in this – he gets the fact that overregulation is just destroying the economy,” Musso said.

Cornelius “Con” Hurley, director of the Center for Finance, Law and Policy at Boston University, envisions a similar fate for the CFPB. While Trump will most likely go after the organization, he’s unlikely to entirely eviscerate it. Eliminating the bureau altogether would require 60 votes in the Senate, which already makes it an improbable scenario.

“Plus, Wells Fargo pretty much inoculated the agency from being eliminated so it’s not as politically palatable as it might have been two or three months ago,” he said, alluding to the phony account opening scandal still fresh in many consumers’ minds.

Instead, Trump could convert the CFPB from its current structure as an agency with a single director to a multi-member commission, a scenario Hurley thinks is almost a given in light of the recent court ruling that declared the CFPB’s current structure to be unconstitutional.

And now that the CFPB’s director serves at the will of the president, Trump may fire Director Richard Cordray, or at least ask for his resignation.

Musso anticipates that Trump may also request resignations from other key agency heads, including Fed President Janet Yellen and FDIC Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg.

Two-For-One Special On Dodd-Frank

The fate of the Dodd-Frank Act is equally uncertain at this point, and the 2010 omnibus banking bill is another one of the many people, places and things that have drawn the president-elect’s ire. Additionally, the president-elect recently promised to eliminate two old regulations for every new regulation, and while he didn’t explain exactly how that math works, Dodd-Frank certainly gives him a lot of twos.

Don’t expect stress testing to go, though. That’s one aspect of Dodd-Frank that many agree will probably stay put in one form or another.

David O’Connell, a senior analyst with Aite Group, said that in the intervening years since the Great Recession and subsequent attempts at financial reform, many banks have embraced stress testing as a form of risk analytics. Even if regulators loosen up stress-testing requirements, banks will probably still practice some form of it for their own purposes.

“Whenever I talked to folks about stress testing, I detected an interesting lack of resentment that they had to do it. I think they actually embraced stress testing as a form of risk analytics,” he told Banker & Tradesman.

Financial reform might instead look more like the Financial Choice Act introduced by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, said David Permut, a partner in Goodwin Procter’s financial industry group. That bill included a number of reforms to the CFPB, as well as the repeal of certain provisions of Dodd-Frank, like the Volcker Rule.

“It’s more difficult to undo regulation,” Permut said, so the most vulnerable provisions of Dodd-Frank may be the ones that have yet to be finalized, like the proposed consumer arbitration rules.

Meanwhile, Musso thinks that regulators may take their cues from Congress and the new administration and refocus their exams toward what he characterized as a true risk assessment.

“By and large those folks are trying to do the best job they can under the rules that they’ve been given,” he said. “I think given a new set of rules, the agencies are going to do a great job.”

Musso also hoped that some easing of regulatory and compliance burden might slow down M&A activity in the banking sector.

But at the end of the day, nobody can predict exactly what Donald Trump is going to do, and even his most ardent supporters may have to temper their expectations of what Trump will be able to accomplish once he’s in office.

Or as Hurley put it, “It’s easy to go out on the campaign trail and rail against everything under the sun, but now he has to govern – now he has to come up with his own solutions to withstand the test of the marketplace.”