Updated, 8:10 p.m. | Bart Chilton, the outspoken regulator whose colorful commentary on financial risk taking positioned him as a fierce critic of the industry he helped oversee, announced on Tuesday that he was leaving his post at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The move is the latest sign that Wall Street’s scrappiest regulatory agency is poised for a makeover.
His departure, a move that surprised colleagues, creates an opening at an agency that is already short-handed and short of cash.
Gary Gensler, the chairman who lifted the agency’s visibility after the financial crisis, will leave at the end of the year when his term officially ends. The White House, which declined to comment on personnel matters, is vetting potential successors to Mr. Gensler, according to people briefed on the issue. Timothy G. Massad, an assistant secretary of the Treasury, is considered a leading candidate for the job.
But it is unclear who might fill Mr. Chilton’s spot, and whether the White House would pick another commissioner quite so lively. Mr. Chilton has been the agency’s most liberal commissioner since 2007, injecting a mix of populism and levity into an agency that was once maligned as Wall Street’s sleepiest watchdog.
His announcement fittingly coincided with the agency’s decision to propose a new financial rule that Mr. Chilton long championed. The so-called position limits proposal would rein in speculative commodities trading, which has been blamed for pinching consumers at the gas pump and the grocery store.
Mr. Chilton’s knack for blending financial minutiae with poetic inflections and song lyrics — his speeches are sprinkled with references to the likes of Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles — helped him capture the moment.
“I’m reminded of the old Etta James song, ‘At Last,’ ” said Mr. Chilton, one of the agency’s three Democratic members. “At last, we’ve got this rule here,” and at last, he would be leaving the C.F.T.C.
Mr. Chilton, whose departure would cap nearly three decades of government service, said that he recently formalized his decision in a letter to President Obama. He has not publicly specified a reason for the exit, a departure date or his future plans.
But his second term as a commissioner technically ended in April and will formally conclude in December 2014. The White House has not yet renominated him, and commissioners rarely serve three terms. Further complicating matters, he already splits his time between Washington and his home in Arkansas.
Mr. Chilton’s announcement, coming just weeks before Mr. Gensler departs, represents the latest personnel challenge for the agency. Jill Sommers, a Republican commissioner, recently left. David Meister — the enforcement chief who brought actions against JPMorgan Chase and Jon S. Corzine, the former top executive of the bankrupt brokerage firm MF Global — left the agency last week. And after cuts to its budget, the agency recently announced that it was furloughing workers.
If Mr. Chilton and Mr. Gensler leave before their replacements are picked, the five-member commission will be down to just two: one Democrat, Mark Wetjen, and one Republican, Scott O’Malia.
An Indiana native and longtime creature of Capitol Hill — he worked for three different members of Congress and was a senior adviser to then-Senator Tom Daschle when he was the Democratic leader of the Senate — Mr. Chilton arrived at the trading commission in 2007. At the time, the agency was something of a regulatory backwater.
But after the 2008 financial crisis, the agency inherited broad new authority from the Dodd-Frank Act. Under the law, the agency’s reach encompassed the $40 trillion futures business as well as the dark corners of the $300 trillion derivatives market that were at the center of the financial crisis.
Mr. Chilton, an unapologetic supporter of Dodd-Frank, nudged colleagues to tighten rules the agency was adopting under the 2010 law.
The position limits proposal, intended to limit the size of any trader’s footprint in the commodities market, was one such rule. Dismissing Wall Street’s concerns as “trying to dance on the head of a legal pin,” Mr. Chilton demanded that the agency complete the rule. And when a federal judge struck down the rule last year, Mr. Chilton urged colleagues to propose a new version, leading to the vote on Tuesday.
While the agency has long had rules in place to limit speculation in the markets, those caps previously applied only to nine agricultural commodities, including corn and wheat. With the new rules, the commission has proposed to apply these limitations more broadly to include derivative contracts for 28 different types of commodities, including agriculture, energy and metal contracts.
The agency approved the new proposal in a 3-1 vote, with Mr. O’Malia voting against it. The proposal is now open for public comment.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and a proponent of the plan, said Mr. Gensler and Mr. Chilton “deserve credit for finally pushing the revised rule over the finish line.”
Mr. Chilton, whose support of Dodd-Frank made him a darling of consumer groups and a scourge of Wall Street, has typically saved his harshest rebukes for the firms he regulated. When MF Global collapsed in 2011 and more than $1 billion in customer money disappeared, for example, he likened the investigation to the “magical mystery tour,” a reference to the Beatles album.
Mr. Chilton at times turned that anger on his own colleagues. He dismissed the agency’s $1.5 million fine of Goldman Sachs last year as “puny” and a “slap on the wrist.”
Even for someone known to be unpredictable, his announcement on Tuesday appeared to catch colleagues off guard.
“I’m surprised by the news and disappointed,” Mr. Wetjen said.
Mr. Gensler, calling Mr. Chilton “a true public servant,” urged him to stay. “I just still want to go at you a little bit longer about whether this is your last meeting,” Mr. Gensler said, adding that “we’ll continue those conversations in private.”
Mr. Chilton, who wrote a book on Ponzi schemes and is now writing another, has signaled grander ambitions. Author. Public speaker. Poet?
Mr. Chilton has waxed poetic on everything from position limits to delays in Dodd-Frank. The latter topic led him to invoke, of all things, Pink Floyd lyrics. (“Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies/Tongue-tied and twisted; just an earthbound misfit, I.”)
“The message in the metaphor is that we really are boarding, implementing that is, and ready for regulatory takeoff of Dodd-Frank,” he said. “We’ve been waiting around the gate area, eating Cinnabons and watching cable news since July of 2010,” when the law was enacted.
Mr. Chilton’s departure, like many of his acts as a regulator, was unusual. Government officials typically telegraph their departures and land at large law firms or lobbying shops.
But, as one official said on Tuesday, “Bart wouldn’t do anything that would be considered close to conventional.”