As President Trump enacts his sweeping effort to reshape the U.S. economy, Arkansas congressman French Hill will play a pivotal role in advancing that agenda as chair of the influential House Financial Services Committee. The role is a prestigious one but fraught. Hill must help Congressional Republicans navigate the economic fallout of Trump’s massive tariffs, which have put the U.S. on the brink of a recession—while also reconciling the President’s bruising protectionism with his own lifelong commitment to free trade.
In an interview with Fortune from his office in the Longworth House Office Building last Tuesday, the day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariff program, Hill described the president’s aggressive strategy as “challenging in a communications point of view.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not at all without a level of merit to be tried,” Hill said. “I would hope that Congress could help the administration in sorting through the tariff strategies that can be productive and beneficial long term.”
Tariff whiplash
During his nearly 50-year career, Hill has moved back and forth between the private sector and D.C., working in commercial banking and private equity as well as a Congressional staffer and Treasury official.
Hill, genteel with a gray pinstripe suit and soft southern drawl, said that he loved the finality of private sector decision making but also the puzzle solving that goes with public policy. “I believe strongly in the old scouting adage that you ought to leave your campsite cleaner than you found it,” he told Fortune. “So I like that fiduciary aspect of serving in public life.”
Hill is a lifelong Republican, and many of his accomplishments reflect what, for decades, were the party’s top fiscal priorities. Those include coordinating White House economic policy under President George H.W. Bush, and helping to negotiate NAFTA, the landmark free trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada that was enacted under President Clinton.
Despite his free market ways, Hill notes that the U.S. also has a history of deploying aggressive, proactive trade strategies when it is in the country’s interest to do so. He points to President Reagan and his GOP allies passing export restrictions that caused Japan to move truck manufacturing into the U.S. in the 1980s.
Hill concedes, though, that Trump’s bruising tariff campaign is entering uncharted territories, especially as it seeks to pursue four strategies at once: using tariffs to sanction behavior like fentanyl smuggling; bringing industries like heavy manufacturing back to the U.S; reducing trade deficits with other countries; and increasing tariff revenue.
While Hill brushed off what he described as the “short-term market reaction,” or U.S. stocks suffering their worst week since 2020, he did argue that Congress should take a more active role, including by providing guidance and taking testimony, as well as through specific authority to approve bilateral and multilateral deals. “[It] would be helpful for President Trump in being able to achieve the ultimate goals he has,” Hill said.
The crypto agenda
While tariffs have taken over the economic debate in D.C., Hill’s top priority is crypto: a policy area he spearheaded as chair of the digital assets subcommittee during his previous term.
After the Biden administration oversaw a crackdown on the blockchain industry, Trump has embraced the sector, buoyed by tens of millions of dollars of campaign donations from pro-crypto groups. During his first few months in office, Trump has appointed senior crypto advisers, signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and implored Congress to pass wide-ranging legislation to establish guardrails for the sector.
Hill is at the center of the legislative talks. Under his predecessor, former chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the House Financial Services Committee passed two crypto bills to create regulation for stablecoins, a type of dollar-backed cryptocurrency, as well as broader market structure guidelines for how exchanges and regulators should operate, though neither reached the president’s desk.
Hill is optimistic that this term will be different, especially because both the House and Senate financial committees have already advanced their versions of the stablecoin bill. “It’s a very good start,” Hill told Fortune. “We’ve never had that kind of engagement from the Senate before.” After a committee hearing last week on market structure, Hill said that he expects to spend the rest of April and May working on the framework for the bill before it’s introduced for markup, or the process where committee members can add amendments.
Though both bills have bipartisan support, not everyone is on board. Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who previously worked with McHenry on a stablecoin bill, has raised concerns over conflict of interest, with Trump’s crypto project World Liberty Financial working on its own stablecoin, and Elon Musk moving further into the payments space with his social media company X, formerly Twitter. When asked about possible conflicts, Hill deflected, saying that “they have to be responsible for their personal business dealings vis-à-vis them serving in a position of public trust.”
The CFPB and beyond
While crypto dominates the legislative agenda, Hill’s committee has still been busy with other efforts, including resolutions to overturn rules enacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a top deregulatory priority for Trump and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
One of the resolutions, which the House approved last week, would strike a CFPB rule to limit banks’ overdraft fees to $5—a program that the agency argued would force banks to charge consumers their actual cost for overdraft fees, rather than inflating those fees to the tune of $5 billion a year.
While the CFPB’s rule might seem in line with Trump’s populist agenda, it received broad pushback from Republicans, including Hill, who said that he’s opposed to price regulation in general. “I don’t necessarily buy the CFPB in their omnipotence to say that it costs $5, have a nice day,” he told Fortune. “I just don’t want the federal government setting prices.”
Another House resolution overturned an impending CFPB rule that sought to establish regulations around how big tech platforms like Meta and PayPal engage in payment services. The rule would have established some parity with bank regulation, and Hill said that he understood “the concept,” given that his stablecoin bill would have the same federal oversight for banks and non-banks. Still, he argued that the rule came as “midnight rulemaking” at the end of the Biden administration. “They rushed it just to jam it,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s unanimity of view that they have the authority to do that.”
Despite other initiatives—including updating accredited investors rules and reauthorizing housing development programs—crypto remains top of mind. A copy of Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, sat on Hill’s bookshelf. The congressman said that he’s read it, but still has lingering questions about the FTX debacle. “I want to see all of [former SEC chair] Gary Gensler’s emails,” he joked.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com