Mick Mulvaney is the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat we don’t deserve. We are lucky to have him.
The acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just fired the agency’s advisory board in what definitely feels like a power play. It would be an outrage normally, another example of an administrator running amok, if Mulvaney wasn’t actually undercutting the agency and his own power in order to illustrate that Congress created CFPB as a completely unaccountable agency.
The panel is made up of consumer advocates and academics who advise the director on new regulations and policies. They began complaining, the Washington Post reports, that Mulvaney wasn’t utilizing their expertise and, among other things, had cancelled one of their legally required advisory board meetings. Eleven board members decided to complain to the press and so Mulvaney told all of them, “you’re fired.”
All 25 members were notified by email Wednesday that their services were no longer be required and in a public statement agency spokesman, John Czwartacki, explained exactly why.
“The outspoken members of the Consumer Advisory Board,” Czwartacki wrote, “seem more concerned about protecting their taxpayer funded junkets to Washington, D.C., and being wined and dined by the Bureau than protecting consumers.”
That decision left Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in a predictable hugg. “Mick Mulvaney has no intention of putting consumers above financial firms that cheat them,” wrote Warren, who helped draw up the blueprints of the bureau. “This is what happens when you put someone in charge of an agency they think shouldn’t exist.”
And on that last point, Warren isn’t wrong.
Mulvaney sponsored legislation to abolish the bureau when he was a member of the House of Representatives. And while that effort failed, Mulvaney is trying to destroy the CFPB from the inside out. He has shut down its databases, publicly questioned its congressional mandate, and delayed implementation of rules concerning payday lending. By abolishing the board, Mulvaney just hacked off one of the agency’s limbs and there is nothing that Warren, or anyone else, can do about it.
If this seems a little bit authoritarian, that’s because it is. And that’s the point. Mulvaney is giving liberal progressives a masterclass on the dangers of the administrative state. If liberals like Warren don’t like unaccountable bureaucrats, Mulvaney is teaching them not to create unaccountable bureaucracies in the first place.
Of course, if Mulvaney was using the CFPB to his own special interest – say favoring one industry or corporation over another – that might be a problem. But the acting director isn’t doing that. He is simply returning to the status quo by cannibalizing the agency and diminishing his own power in the process.
