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Republican enthusiasm for culling and combining the many US banking regulators is complicating efforts by the incoming administration of Donald Trump to find heads for those watchdogs.

The problem is particularly acute for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which focuses on the way lenders treat customers. The CFPB has been a target of hostility from Republicans since its creation after the 2008 financial crisis. A number of experienced candidates have demurred when contacted about the position, people familiar with the search said.

“Republicans think the CFPB is unconstitutional, and even if you do make progress in protecting middle-class and low income Americans, the Democrats will never give you credit because you’re wearing the wrong colour jersey,” said a former senior financial regulator who is not interested in the job.

Recruiting issues are becoming more serious because of growing ferment around consolidating banking regulatory and supervisory responsibilities that are currently spread among the US Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Some potential candidates have been interviewed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the bosses of Trump’s newly created advisory committee, the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), and have been asked about streamlining regulation, people close to the process said.

Musk has called for eliminating the CFPB and Ramaswamy asserted last week on social media that it was “one of the easiest agencies to shut down”. The Wall Street Journal reported that some regulatory candidates have been asked whether it would be possible to eliminate the FDIC, which has protected bank depositors since the Great Depression.

The Trump transition team’s questions, combined with enthusiasm from the Republicans due to run key committees on Capitol Hill for lightening the regulatory load, could herald the first serious effort to reshape the guardrails for the banking industry since the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

“I think the Trump team might be serious about this,” said Bill Isaac, a former FDIC chair, adding that he has talked to leading Capitol Hill players about his proposal to merge the OCC and the supervisory functions of the Fed and FDIC into a new regulator. “The system is broken.”

Tim Scott, the Republican in line to chair the Senate Banking Committee, has concerns with the current structure of the US’s bank regulatory system, his spokesman said, but did not specify whether he supported consolidating banking regulators. Scott “looks forward to working with the incoming Trump administration to find solutions to streamline regulation, reduce red tape, and increase efficiency while ensuring the continued stability of our financial system.”

But experienced Washington hands point out that multiple prior attempts to consolidate the patchwork of banking regulators into a single super-watchdog have failed. In 2010, Republicans provided crucial votes to help kill the idea.

“Most regulatory scholars support some form of consolidation among bank regulators in the US, but every attempt at doing this has failed. After every financial crisis, there is more regulation and more regulators than there were before,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at Brookings and former Treasury official under Barack Obama.

During Trump’s first term, the acting head of the CFPB Mick Mulvaney at one point refused to request any funding for the watchdog, but it eventually resumed normal operations.

“Congress is needed for any consequential structural changes and it is incredibly difficult to envision a scenario where this issue makes it on the agenda, let alone gets the Democratic support necessary for enactment,” said Isaac Boltansky, managing director at BTIG.

Investor groups and former regulators have expressed alarm at the prospect of weakening the FDIC, noting that it is well known and popular with consumers, in part because most banks tout its deposit insurance as part of their advertising.

“FDIC has a perfect record of protecting insured deposits for over 90 years. Strong consumer confidence in the brand, providing stability during crises,” tweeted Sheila Bair, a former FDIC chair.

Patrick Woodall, managing director for policy at Americans for Financial Reform, said: “The FDIC stamp of approval has safeguarded depositors — and confidence in the banking industry — for nearly a century, while the CFPB has a strong track record of standing up for the little guy. Billionaire ideas about consumer protection and financial stability will do nothing for everyday people.”

Even Isaac said he opposes eliminating the FDIC as an independent agency, because of its emergency bank takeover responsibilities.

“I don’t think that makes any sense,” he said. The idea is to have the FDIC be an independent, bipartisan agency and the Treasury is anything but.”

The Trump transition team did not reply to a request for comment.

As jubilant Syrians celebrated the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad this week, dire warnings proliferated across Arabic social media: that this joyful moment could lead to a bleak future.

That the end of the Assad dynasty came at the hands of an armed Islamist group with former links to al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, deepened alarm even among Arabs well aware of the blood-soaked record of Assad’s regime.

“The people who are optimistic for the future of Syria, have they not been with us during the past 14 years?” Ezzedine Fishere, an Egyptian political science professor at Dartmouth University in the US, wrote on Facebook.

Another Egyptian social media user posted: “Isn’t what happened in Iraq, and after that the Arab uprisings [of 2011] enough to be terrified of what’s coming?”

In 2011 a wave of popular uprisings swept across the Arab world, toppling despots in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and igniting hopes of democratic government and economic prosperity — hopes that were subsequently shattered by new autocracies or civil wars. Syria’s uprising began at the same time, but its government has only fallen 13 years later.

Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist who moved to London in 2017, said warnings she received from Tunisian and Egyptian friends were “simplistic and did not take the Syrian context into consideration. It is as if they are saying: ‘Those poor people are happy but they don’t know what awaits them’.”

“I am a bit hopeful,” she said. “We Syrians are aware of our own failures even more than we are aware of those of others. I hope we will learn not just from the lessons of others, but also from our own experiences.”

For Syrians, this is a moment of intense hope, even if that is tinged with apprehension. Many Syrians are experiencing the same elation others in the region felt when they shook off their oppressors in 2011.

When Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who ruled Egypt for 30 years, stepped down in 2011 after 18 days of peaceful protests, ecstatic crowds poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, chanting: “Hold your head up high, you are Egyptian.”

The Muslim Brotherhood subsequently won parliamentary elections, and in 2012 Mohamed Morsi, one of the group’s leaders, was elected president with a slim majority. His brief rule alienated many, including pro-revolution groups. Secular parties, elites from the Mubarak era and a range of Egyptians alarmed by the rise of the Islamists agitated against his rule.

That gave Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, then defence minister and now president, opportunity to oust Morsi in a 2013 coup with broad popular support. Since then, Egypt’s democratic experiment has been curtailed, demonstrations are banned and there is little space for dissent.

Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian publisher and critic of the Sisi regime, said the transition failed because the Islamists “had been trying to hog the situation, and the economy was not taken seriously”.

“The military had been standing on the sidelines and were not really prepared to give up power, but failure was largely due to the bad performance of the country’s political forces,” he said.

After its own uprising, Tunisia’s fledgling democracy survived for a decade, but collapsed when Kais Saied, a democratically elected populist president, in 2021 shuttered parliament, rewrote the constitution to concentrate power in his hands and began jailing critics.

The autocratic shift was welcomed by Tunisians fed up with chaotic politics, falling living standards and ineffective government. In October Saied won the latest presidential elections with 90 per cent of the vote after jailing the more credible of two candidates allowed to run against him.

The lesson from Tunisia, said Olfa Lamloum, a political scientist in Tunis, is that “democratic freedoms cannot survive without the basics of a dignified life.

“Protests in the past 10 years by the unemployed and others have been about social and economic rights,” she said. “People have to see that their lives are changing for the better.”

After an uprising in Libya ousted Muammer Gaddafi in 2011, the country split under two rival governments. They fought a civil war in 2019, in which Russia and regional powers armed and backed different sides.

Rival ruling elites have since settled into dysfunctional coexistence, funding themselves by siphoning off Libya’s oil revenues.

Syria’s trajectory seems unlikely to retrace the steps of other so-called “Arab Spring” countries, analysts said. Its fragmentation under different armed rebel groups, coupled with a mosaic of minorities, means the challenges will be different.

Also the collapse of the Assad regime followed a 13-year civil war in which half a million people were killed, mostly by the regime, and millions became refugees.

Assad’s ferocious repression of peaceful demonstrations in 2011 transformed the Syrian revolution into an armed uprising in which Islamist factions ultimately became the strongest groups. Assad invited in foreign allies: initially Iran and Iranian-backed militants including Hizbollah, then Russia, whose air force bombed rebel-held areas.

Following Assad’s fall, Isis still has active cells in parts of Syria; US-backed Kurds have set up an autonomous enclave in the north east; and Turkey, which controls pockets of northern Syria, backs other rebels to keep Kurdish militants in check. Ankara views Syrian Kurdish militants as an extension of its separatist Kurdistan Workers’ party, PKK, which has fought the Turkish state for four decades.

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the Sunni HTS, has sought to rebrand himself as a moderate Islamist who will not trample on the rights of Syria’s minorities, including Christians, and the Alawites who formed the bedrock of the Assad regime. The Assad family were themselves Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

But he has not promised a democracy or outlined a vision of the future, while the US designates both him and his group as terrorists.

Yassin Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer and political dissident who spent 16 years in prison, wrote on Facebook that the “new Syria” could not be a state “ruled by an Islamist Sunni Assad . . . in which people remain followers without political rights and public freedoms including the freedom of religious belief”.

There are also fears that Jolani could fail to unite the country, leaving rebel groups fighting over the spoils of Assad’s wrecked state, reigniting conflict and drawing in foreign interference.

Paul Salem, vice-president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, said that while Syria’s future was likely to be “bumpy”, it was a positive sign that the Syrian state has not melted away, unlike the Libyan state after Gaddafi’s fall.

“Notice also that opposition forces are protecting all government offices, all public institutions. They are not attacking any of them,” he said.

Salem said Syria’s neighbours including Turkey “have no interest in a failed state” on their doorstep. While the presence of US-backed Kurdish militants and a self-governing Kurdish enclave could become an issue, it could be managed by “good diplomacy between Washington and Ankara”, he said.

“It’s definitely the case that removing a tyrant, while welcomed and celebrated, that’s very different from actually having a transition to something better,” said Salem.

“But in the Syrian case [because of] the extreme evil of the Assad regime, you can’t blame Syrians. He had to go.”

A prominent attorney who once served as a Manhattan chief assistant district attorney will represent Luigi Mangione as he faces murder charges in New York for the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Karen Friedman Agnifilo is currently working at Agnifilo Intrater, which specializes in “complex and sensitive criminal matters,” according to its website.

The law group confirmed on Saturday that Mangione retained Friedman Agnifilo, adding that she “will not be making any statements at this time.”

Mangione, 26, is scheduled to appear in a preliminary hearing in Pennsylvania on Dec. 23 regarding charges related to a 3D-printed gun and fake ID. He is currently being held without bail. Earlier this week, Mangione contested extradition to New York, where he faces murder charges. An online fundraiser made to help with Mangione’s legal fees has so far raised over $97,000.

Friedman Agnifilo worked as a prosecutor for much of her career before she went into private practice in 2021.

For seven years, she was the second-in-command at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She worked under Cyrus Vance Jr. — who was known for going after former film producer Harvey Weinstein, as well as President-elect Donald Trump.

At the Manhattan DA’s office, Friedman Agnifilo prosecuted violent crime cases, including those that had “a mental health component,” according to her law firm bio. She also served as the acting district attorney when Vance was out of the jurisdiction.

Two other attorneys from Agnifilo Intrater are representing Sean “Diddy” Combs in the criminal case against him, where he was charged with sex trafficking and racketeering.

UnitedHealth Group CEO speaks out

The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO on Dec. 4 sent shockwaves across the country. It also brought issues around health care access in the U.S. into sharp focus, with widespread anger directed at health insurance companies on social media.

On Friday, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, said he agreed that the health care system is flawed.

“We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it,” he wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times.

“We understand and share the desire to build a health care system that works better for everyone,” he added.

Witty added that Thompson was among those who “tried their best for those they serve.” He wrote, “When a colleague proposed a new idea to Brian, he would always ask, ‘Would you want this for your own family?’ If not, end of discussion.”

The UnitedHealth Group CEO ended the op-ed asserting that Thompson was dedicated to building a more affordable, transparent and compassionate health care — adding that it was those characteristics that he and others in UnitedHealth Group will emulate.

The op-ed received over 2,400 comments before the comments section was closed. Many of the responses were of readers unconvinced by Witty’s statements.

Among the top recommended comments came from Ralph from Naples, Fla., who wrote, “I have read this twice, and in essence it says nothing. What is he proposing to change or improve?”

Another top comment came from Phil from London: “What happened to Mr Thompson was tragic, but to describe him as someone ‘who was working to make health care better for everyone’ is just patently false. He was working to maximize profits for the company’s shareholders, that is the *sole* responsibility of a CEO and it continues to be the main reason why healthcare in the US is completely broken.”