Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Monday he plans to overhaul the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as much possible while he is at its helm, telling reporters that “elections have consequences at every agency, and that includes the CFPB.”
Monday marked Mulvaney’s first day on the job as interim director of the bureau, a key watchdog agency that the former Republican congressman once called a “sick, sad joke.” The resignation of former CFPB Director Richard Cordray last week set the stage for a legal showdown over who – Mulvaney or deputy director Leandra English – should be left in charge.
“The president has made it very clear that he wants me here,” Mulvaney said Monday. “I’m going to be here about three days a week and I’m going to be across the street at OMB about three days a week. I realize that adds up to more than five [work] days a week, but that’s life.”
Mulvaney said his first day at the agency went smoothly, but acknowledged that some Obama appointees may have uncomfortable with him taking on the leadership role.
“I think it’s been more awkward for people who work here. I don’t know [English]. I haven’t met her,” Mulvaney said. “I read some reports that said there were two people who showed up to work today claiming to be director. I can assure you, there was one person because she didn’t show up.”
English filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court of Washington late Sunday, hours before Mulvaney arrived at the agency with doughnuts in tow, arguing that he is the bureau’s rightful acting director.
“The President’s purported or intended appointment of defendant Mulvaney as Acting Director of the CFPB is unlawful,” the lawsuit said.
Mulvaney was tapped by Trump on Friday to lead the agency until the president selects a successor, placing him in an unusual position as the simultaneous director of two federal agencies. Lawyers for the Trump administration have said the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act justifies the president’s installment of Mulvaney as acting director.
The status stipulates that “the President may direct a person who serves in an office for which appointment is required to be made by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to perform the functions and duties of the vacant office temporarily in an acting capacity.” Most Republican lawmakers have backed Trump’s decision, claiming he is “on good ground” to appoint Mulvaney.
Should a judge decide otherwise, Mulvaney said he will obey the ruling.
“If the judge issues a temporary restraining order allowing me not to come into the building, I will absolutely follow the law,” he told reporters at a press conference after English filed her lawsuit. “I will be here until the court or the president tells me otherwise.”
During a 2014 interview with the Credit Union Times, Mulvaney cast the CFPB as “a wonderful example of how a bureaucracy will function if it has no accountability to anybody.”
“Some of us would like to get rid of it,” he said.
For now, however, Mulvaney said he is focused on acting within his scope of authority to revamp the agency “to get it back to the point where it can protect people without choking capitalism.”
“The reasons I said [the agency is a sick, sad joke] – the reasons that I still believe this agency is flawed – are reasons that I think people back home would agree with,” he explained. “It is a completely unaccountable agency and I think that’s wrong. That’s why we need structural and legislative change to the way this place is being run.”
