Stephen Douglas Johnson (1963–2003), also known as Steve Johnson, was a Washington, D.C. banking lawyer; a chief lobbyist for the banking and insurance industries; U.S. House Chief Counsel for Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit from February 1995 to November 1997, the heyday of the Gingrich Revolution; and Bush Administration Senior Advisor to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) where among his varied duties he assisted the director Armando Falcon in the investigation of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Rather than being ideological, Johnson was a pragmatic liberal Republican who endeavored to advance reform and modernization of the financial services sector; to seek fair tax and other benefits for all Americans;[4] and to clarify for the common good privacy, credit, and other issues relevant to the banking, insurance, and securities industries.
While he served as Chief Counsel under Chairperson Marge Roukema, he also had to strike a balance between the diverse personalities composing the subcommittee membership that included Bill McCollum, Toby Roth, Sonny Bono, Ron Paul, Gerald C. Weller, Peter T. King, and Doug Bereuter of the majority to Joseph Kennedy II, Charles E. Schumer, Bruce Vento, Kweisi Mfume, John J. LaFalce, Carolyn B. Maloney, Ken Bentsen, and Cynthia A. McKinney to achieve outcomes with which they all could live.
He then moved on to become Vice President and Senior Counsel of the Columbus Group/Columbia Capitol Corporation whose managing directors included Mark Warner, now the junior U. S. senator from Virginia.
[12] Prior to serving on the Hill as Chief Counsel, Johnson began his career as an associate with "Muldoon, Murphy and Faucette", a Washington, D.C. based law firm whose specialty was S & L conversions in the late 1980s and 1990s.
From Muldoon et al., Johnson went on to become Regulatory Counsel for ISD/Shaw, now Federal Analytics, Inc, which was headed by Karen Shaw for whom he contributed to the three-volume Combating Credit Discrimination published by the Chicago based American Bankers Institute.
Interment occurred in the Flossmoor area subsequently because Johnson wished to be buried near his maternal grandfather, Jan Crull, a scion of old Dutch Protestant Patrician family[15] and a man who had achieved success before World War II and never repeated it thereafter.