Mick Mulvaney asked Congress Monday to rein in the power of the agency he leads, and warned lawmakers that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is “far too powerful” under current law.
“By structuring the Bureau the way it has, Congress established an agency primed to ignore due process and abandon the rule of law in favor of bureaucratic fiat and administrative absolutism,” Mulvaney told Congress in the semi-annual report of the CFPB. The agency is responsible for overseeing mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products.
Mulvaney, the acting director, asked for four major changes to the agency’s structure, including that it be funded through congressional appropriations rather than through the Federal Reserve, which he said makes the director more answerable to the president. He called for a dedicated inspector general for the CFPB, and asked that Congress be required to approve any major rules established by the Bureau.
Notably, though, Mulvaney did not ask that the Bureau be changed to a five-member bipartisan commission, instead of an agency headed by a sole director. Some conservatives and financial industry figures have advocated for a commission, but others favor a single director as a way to more quickly pare back rules.
Since President Trump gave Mulvaney responsibility for the CFPB in addition to his job as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney has aggressively changed policy in a conservative direction. Democrats have repeatedly clashed with him over his efforts to halt rules and ease off of some enforcement actions.
