Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters dump Silicon Valley bank contributions

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said they are dumping campaign contributions related to Silicon Valley Bank following the financial institution’s collapse.

Schumer has donated all SVB-related political contributions to charity, spokeswoman Allison Biasott told CNBC. The recipients include organizations based in Schumer’s home state, an unnamed source told the network.

(BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company, relies on SVB.)

Schumer received $2,700 from the bank’s PAC in 2015and $5,800 from CEO Greg Becker in June 2021, the maximum donation allowed, according to the files of the Federal Election Commission. Becker and other SVB executives have been purged in the government’s takeover of the failed bank.

Becker also made a campaign contribution to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who has not addressed the matter.

Warner is one of 17 Senate democrats who did you vote with republicans to abolish parts of the Dodd-Frank Act that tightened banking regulations after the 2008 financial crisis. The 2018 bill, signed into law by the president donald trumpit relaxed regulations on midsize banks such as SVB and New York-based Signature Bank, which collapsed on Sunday.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has criticized Becker for pushing for loosening regulations.

“He lobbied for weaker rules, got what he wanted, and took this opportunity to greedily and incompetently abdicate his core responsibilities to his clients and the public, facilitating a near economic disaster,” Warren. wrote in a letter to the former CEO on Tuesday.

“There is a lot of work to be done to understand the SVB failure, and these efforts must start with understanding its role in rolling back the banking regulations that facilitated this failure,” Warren added.

Waters, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told politician on Tuesday that he will return the $2,500 contribution he received from the bank’s PAC in 2020, when he chaired that panel.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last week after depositors rushed to withdraw their money. The US government guaranteed all deposits over $250,000 not covered by FDIC protection.