Two Camps Assert They Each Have Control Over CFPB

White House budget chief and an Obama-era official both claim rights to lead the regulator

Some experts say there is little incentive for Mr. Trump to quickly nominate a permanent director. Rather, by allowing Mr. Mulvaney a year or longer to serve as a caretaker at the CFPB, the president could ensure several years of Republican control of the agency because directors serve five-year terms once they are confirmed.

 ..  To allow the CFPB to work quickly, lawmakers designed the bureau to be independent, stating that its single director could only be dismissed by the president for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” and insulating its budget from congressional oversight.
..  Republican lawmakers and the financial industry have long said the agency’s rules and supervisory and enforcement activities have increased compliance costs and reduced credit availability for vulnerable consumers the bureau was created to protect. 

.. The pushback has been particularly strong from industries that had previously been regulated lightly, such as so-called payday and auto lending.

.. Republicans have proposed curbs to the CFPB’s power, giving Congress control of its budget and narrowing the scope of its regulatory powers that would leave it primarily an enforcement agency.

.. Mr Mulvaney, a former Republican House member from South Carolina, once called the CFPB a “sad, sick joke” and has called for an overhaul of the agency, including curtailing its budget. Other possible actions include delaying the enactment of a recently issued rule on high-interest small consumer loans known as payday lending, amending a 2013 mortgage rule that tightened underwriting standards and reassessing pending lawsuits against companies such as student-loan servicer Navient Corp.

Richard Cordray’s Political Stunt

Democrats pretend that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is its own branch of government.

This fiasco underscores that the CFPB is a rogue agency whose structure is an affront to the Constitution’s separation of powers. A panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in PHH Corp. v. CFPB that the “independence” Mr. Frank so prizes is unconstitutional and that the bureau’s director must be subject to presidential authority.

.. Democrats created an executive-branch agency insulated from Congressional appropriations and presidential control, and now they claim to be able to run it like a branch of government unto itself with a self-sustaining directorship. This is a perversion of constitutional government that the President is right to resist and the courts should reject.