Bowman, a Republican, is both an outsider whom supporters have cast as Main Street’s antidote to big banks’ influence, and a Washington insider, a member of the New York bar, and an increasingly influential figure in the monetary-policy realm. Her insider/outsider status has won her fans and foes in equal measure, and may help her to navigate a difficult and politically charged job.

Bowman is known to prefer limited oversight and holds views that tend to align with bank lobbyists, in contrast to her tough-on-banks predecessor Michael Barr, who stepped down from his supervisory post earlier this year but whose term as a Fed governor ends in 2032. She has won the support of lawmakers and industry leaders critical of post-financial-crisis banking rules, and a White House eager to ease regulatory pressures while focusing its rhetoric on working Americans.

Wall Street and Main Street banks alike have lobbied for the kind of dialed-back regulation that banking and regulatory insiders expect Bowman, 53, to pursue. U.S. banks see themselves as much healthier companies than they were in the years leading up to the 2008-09 financial crisis. And in many ways they are, as postcrisis rule-making intended.

Bank executives argue that the strength and stability that banks have achieved since then warrants a letup of regulations they see as overly burdensome and a hindrance to profit growth.

Many Democrats and consumer-protection advocates view that premise as shortsighted, however, and consider Bowman’s advocacy for reduced bank capital requirements and more-transparent stress tests dangerous. (The supervision role was established by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which cemented post-financial-crisis rules to rein in banks and promote accountability.)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and prominent bank critic who serves on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement to Barron’s that Bowman “has a long track record at the Fed of putting Wall Street over working families, and in her confirmation hearing she refused to answer questions about the damaging economic impacts of President Trump’s tariff chaos. Our economy and our financial system can’t afford another Trump regulator in a critical role bent on weakening financial safeguards during a time of deep uncertainty.”

Bowman declined to comment.

Bowman, known as Miki, was born in 1971 in Honolulu and grew up in a military family that moved frequently. But she has Kansas roots in community banking nearly as old as the state itself. Her great-great-grandfather helped charter Farmers and Drovers Bank in 1882 in Council Grove, Kan. (current population: about 2,100). The bank now has about $200 million in assets.

Bowman holds degrees from two public Kansas universities: a bachelor’s in advertising and journalism from the University of Kansas, and a law degree from Washburn University. She initially wanted to work in advertising, but later took an interest in intellectual property and worked on related issues while interning during law school for the late Republican Sen. Bob Dole. Her rise thereafter was swift.

Bowman worked as counsel on several House of Representatives committees, then moved into senior roles at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush. She later relocated to London, where her husband, Wesley Bowman, worked as a manager at McKinsey and JPMorgan Chase. In London, she launched a public-affairs firm and led a group that organized Republican interests abroad.

After returning to Kansas in 2010, Bowman joined her family’s community bank, where she spent seven years as vice president, focusing on compliance and serving as a trust officer. She became the state’s banking commissioner in 2017.

A year later, Trump tapped her for the Federal Reserve Board. Her husband, with whom she has two children, now works as director of finance for Stand Together, a nonprofit founded by Republican donor and prominent Kansan Charles Koch.

Trump selected Bowman for a seat at the Fed that Congress said must be occupied by someone with primary experience working in or supervising community banks. That amendment to the Federal Reserve Act came in 2015, during the Obama administration, after a push by community and state banking lobbyists, reflecting concerns that the Fed lacked insight into how its policies affect smaller banks and rural lenders.

Bowman’s nomination to the Fed in 2018 drew mixed reactions. She was confirmed by the Senate on a mostly party-line vote—64 to 34—with several Democrats expressing concern about her limited experience in monetary policy.

Regulators generally define community banks as lenders with less than $10 billion of assets. Ninety percent of the 4,487 banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. are community banks.

Bowman’s legacy and experience in community banking won her enthusiastic industry endorsements, however. Rebeca Romero Rainey, president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, says Bowman’s “real-world perspective is invaluable and demonstrates a collaborative, informed approach to policymaking grounded in the real economy.”

Bankers like her approach in no small part because of her vocal support for “tailoring,” or changing banks’ regulatory commitments based on their size and complexity, and subjecting smaller banks in particular to lighter supervision. Tailoring is core to the way she operates as a regulator. It’s a “strong foundational principle upon which to apply bank regulation and supervision,” Bowman said in a speech last year at Harvard Law School.

She has prominent allies in that view. Former St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who worked with Bowman on community banking issues, says she is open to engaging, and “talks to people in the industry and understands concerns.”

Bullard says, “I think these ideas about tailored regulation are pretty important, because these community banks [are] a completely different business from the very large banks like J.P. Morgan.”

Opponents of tailoring say it amounts to a loosening of oversight that prioritizes efficiency over safety, or holding banks to stringent risk and capital standards. It is part of a wider set of criticisms about Bowman’s industry views. Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an economic-justice advocacy organization that negotiates community-benefits agreements between banks and community groups, says he has seen a shift in Bowman’s posture over time toward favoring big banks.

“In some ways, she has become a voice for the big banks; a voice even for crypto,” Van Tol says. “The kinds of things that today she expresses concerns about, the kinds of things she’s advocating for in the regulatory framework, are very different from the kinds of things she was focused on when she first started.”

Bowman’s thinking has also drawn critics inside the Fed. Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College who spent two decades at the Fed, says there “was definitely a feeling that the Federal Reserve Board staff was very condescending to her. She didn’t fit this mold of the prominent academic or the distinguished public figure. She’s a community banker from Kansas.”

Levin is a fan, however. “I talked to her early on,” he says. “I said, ‘Miki, hang in there, you’re really important. You gotta hang in there.’ ”

Bowman did just that, and has sometimes been at odds with the Fed’s leadership on both regulation and monetary policy. She has pushed back on efforts to raise capital requirements for large banks, warning that across-the-board increases could squeeze smaller institutions and restrict credit in rural communities. That stance put her in conflict with Barr, who had spearheaded a sweeping regulatory overhaul in the aftermath of the 2023 regional-banking crisis.

The tension came to a head in April 2023, with the release of Barr’s report on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank the prior month. The report criticized the Fed’s supervisory failures and called for tougher rules on regional banks. But Bowman, a sitting governor, said she wasn’t given the chance to review the report or weigh in before it went public.

“Although this report was published as a report of the board of governors, it was the product of one board member, and was not reviewed by the other members of the board prior to its publication,” she said in a speech that June. “There is a genuine question whether these efforts provide a sufficient accounting of what occurred.”

It was a rare public airing of internal disagreement, and a sign that Bowman wasn’t willing to quietly fall in line. “Miki is a hero of mine,” says Levin, the Dartmouth professor, noting that her speech “only strengthens my admiration.”

In September 2024, Bowman again took an independent path, this time on interest rates. When the Federal Reserve voted to cut its benchmark rate by half a percentage point, she dissented, favoring a smaller quarter-point move. Large cuts, she has argued, risk sending a “premature declaration of victory” on inflation, which remains above the central bank’s 2% target.

Her dissent marked the first by a Fed governor on a rate decision since 2005. Barron’sdeemed Bowman “the loneliest Fed governor” for the outlier move, which proved prescient, given her view that inflation in the U.S. wasn’t yet under control.

Bowman has earned respect from some Fed colleagues. “I really got along well with Miki,” says former Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester. “She had her own views, but she would be informed.”

Mester recalls that Bowman asked questions, gathered information, and took the time to weigh different perspectives before deciding where she stood. “That’s refreshing—somebody who wants to be knowledgeable about things but then is willing to say, ‘OK, I took all that in, here’s a path forward,’ ” she says.

Also in Bowman’s corner: Local banking leaders, who praise her accessibility. Darrin Williams, CEO of Arkadelphia, Ark.–based Southern Bancorp, recently recalled that he and his colleagues met with Bowman at the St. Louis Fed’s nearby offices several years ago. Williams, an adviser to the St. Louis Fed as a member of its Little Rock branch’s board of directors, says he was encouraged by her industry experience and her openness to meeting.

Southern Bancorp is a community-development financial institution—a type of lender that provides banking services in underserved markets. He says he hopes Bowman can help bridge gaps between policymakers’ and bank examiners’ understanding of CDFIs.

Beyond an impact on banking, Bowman’s ascent may point to a looming shift in the Fed’s policy goals.

With Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term set to expire in May 2026, some Fed watchers in Washington and on Wall Street are expecting the central bank to reorient its priorities. The Fed may take a narrower view of its mandate, they say, focusing on price stability and maximum employment but not climate risk, inequality, or other regulatory goals.

Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor with close ties to the Trump administration, is considered a top contender to succeed Powell. Warsh and Bowman met for a conversation in early May at the Hoover Institution’s Monetary Policy Conference at Stanford University, prompting speculation that she could play a central role on a Fed leadership team defined by restraint and a return to core functions.

By the time a new Fed chair is confirmed, Bowman will have settled into her supervisory role. Bankers from Wall Street to Kansas are likely to be pleased, but assessing the broader impact of her policies will take longer.

Write to Rebecca Ungarino at rebecca.ungarino@barrons.com and Nicole Goodkind at nicole.goodkind@barrons.com