Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led a protest Tuesday against President Trump’s decision to appoint a new leader for an agency tasked with regulating banks and other financial institutions, instead of relying on the newly appointed deputy director.
“For six years, this agency has fought for working people, and now it is time for us to fight for the agency,” Warren said Tuesday at a protest rally outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The CFPB, an agency created by the Dodd-Frank banking law that passed during former President Barack Obama’s first term, has become the focal point of a new fight over presidential authority in recent days. Conservatives have long argued that the agency has too much power, but the controversy reached a new pitch when the Obama-appointed director of CFPB resigned in a manner designed to thwart Trump’s ability to replace him with an acting director.
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has been a total disaster as run by the previous administration’s pick,” Trump tweeted last week. “Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public. We will bring it back to life!”
Former director Richard Cordray, who is expected to run as a Democrat for governor of Ohio, resigned last week after positioning his chief of staff to take over as acting director of the agency. Cordray did so by appointing the aide, Leandra English, to be deputy director of the CFBP in one of his final official acts. Under the Dodd-Frank law, that move leaves English as the acting director until the Senate confirms Trump’s nominee to take over the job.
But another law, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, affirms the president’s authority to fill vacancies at federal agencies. So Trump tapped Mick Mulvaney, the current director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to take over as acting director of the bureau.
That angered Warren and other proponents of the bureau, who favor Cordray’s move and worry that Mulvaney — as a long-time critic of the CFPB — will undermine its regulatory work. “Donald Trump and the congressional Republican want to make this all about politics, but this isn’t about politics, this is about what is fair,” Warren said.
Maria Langholz of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which helped organize the Tuesday protest, added in a statement that “Trump is trying to undermine the CFPB by breaking the rules to install a guy who is wholly unfit for the office and has numerous conflicts of interest.”
Trump’s team dismisses such rebukes, noting that an array of federal lawyers — including CFBP general counsel Mary McLeod, who was hired by Cordray — have concluded he has the power to tap Mulvaney.
“Now that the CFPB’s own General Counsel – who was hired under Richard Cordray – has notified the Bureau’s leadership that she agrees with the Administration’s and DOJ’s reading of the law, there should be no question that Director Mulvaney is the Acting Director,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday.
English filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to bar Mulvaney from taking control of the office, but Justice Department lawyers countered that the courts should not respect Cordray’s “bureaucratic sleight-of-hand” or interfere with presidential authority to appoint Mulvaney.
“An order compelling the President to recognize [English] as Acting Director and withdraw his designation of Acting Director Mulvaney would intrude extraordinarily into core Executive Branch operations,” the DOJ argued in a Monday court filing. “and it would lend credence to the view that the leadership of the CFPB is accountable to no one, not even to the President of the United States.”
