US Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould has abstained from a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) vote on staff feedback relating to the July 2025 Dodd-Frank Act Section 165(d) resolution plans.
The FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board published feedback letters covering several resolution plans filed in July 2025.
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Resolution plans, commonly described as living wills, are required to set out how a banking organisation would be resolved in an orderly way if it faced serious financial stress or failure.
The agencies carried out a joint assessment of 2025 submissions from the eight largest and most complex domestic banking organisations, along with 56 foreign banking organisations.
Both the Federal Reserve and FDIC said they found no “shortcomings or deficiencies” in the latest plans, noting previous issues have been “satisfactorily addressed” in these submissions.
On his part, Gould released a statement on his abstention from FDIC vote on resolution plan feedback.
“I am abstaining from voting on the FDIC staff’s proposal regarding the resolution plans of the U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) because I believe that there are fundamental issues with the current resolution planning processes that continue to be unaddressed,” he said.
According to him, the feedback letters rest on, and continue, a “seriously flawed and, in my opinion, extralegal process”.
Gould pointed back to remarks he delivered five months earlier, where he set out legal and conceptual objections to resolution planning at both the bank and holding-company tiers.
He said work is under way to change the FDIC’s requirements for insured depository institution (CIDI) resolution plans, but that Section 165(d) plans have not yet been the focus, and he said that context informed his abstention.
Gould said the latest material did not set out new “shortcomings” or deficiencies.
He said the current letters refer to firms meeting additional items that had been introduced through earlier feedback, including “assurance” and “contingency strategies.”
He noted that in 2024 the Federal Reserve and the FDIC told US GSIBs, via feedback letters, that they expect an “assurance framework” for resolution capabilities, made up of at least five elements listed in those letters.
According to the chief, the process has shifted from planning, to planning plus capabilities, to planning plus capabilities plus assurance of capabilities.
He added that there is no “assurance” that requirements added through feedback letters will stop increasing.
On “contingency strategies,” Gould said the proposed letters describe approaches for keeping critical operations running “through a range of alternative resolution scenarios when financial resources are significantly lower than the execution needs after the Covered Company files for bankruptcy.”
“Although I continue to have legal and policy concerns with the capital and liquidity requirements for resolution planning, I do not believe the answer to those concerns is imposing even more planning and other requirements on firms. We should not continue to pursue attempts to eliminate the risk that the failure of a GSIB will not go according to a resolution plan; it will almost certainly not.”
He said the letters do not spell out the review boundaries or the intended focus for next year’s submissions, though he said they appear to point towards further “capabilities” testing.
