Swapping “Bureau” from back to front is not a simple word shuffle, said Lisa Donner, executive director for the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “Doing that signals you want to take the emphasis away from serving consumers — which unfortunately is what Mulvaney’s been doing in many ways — and put it on ‘this is a bureaucracy’,'” Donner said.
Americans for Financial Reform reported that the financial sector spent $2 billion on political activity in the 2016 election cycle, including $1.1 billion in campaign donations and the rest for lobbying. That’s $3.7 million for every member of Congress.
Senators who voted to reverse this important CFPB action have also opened the door to challenging long-standing regulatory actions that are crucial to protecting workers, consumers, civil rights, the environment, and the economy
“Like other federal regulators, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to give regular updates to Congress on the work it has done to fulfill its statutory mandate. Under Mick Mulvaney, the consumer watchdog has used its just-released semiannual report for a very different purpose: to urge Congress to take away its power to fulfill that mandate.”
Trump’s unlawfully appointed Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mick Mulvaney is giving predatory payday lenders a free pass. Specifically, National Credit Adjusters, a debt collector for payday loan companies with 685 complaints against it, confirmed that a pending case against the company is “dead.”
AFR and more than 300 organizations urge members of Congress to oppose any poison pill financial reform policy riders, whether to put the CFPB under the normal Appropriations process, otherwise weaken the authority, structure or independence of the CFPB.
“The administration’s budget and Mick Mulvaney’s ‘strategic plan’ for the CFPB are transparent attempts to stop the agency from doing what it was designed to do: actually protect consumers.”said Lisa Donner, executive director, Americans for Financial Reform.
“Under the Trump administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has become the Payday Predator Protection Bureau,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon). “Trump and his allies are blatantly trying to dismantle the bureau from the inside. If this isn’t a crystal clear example of the Trump administration governing of, by, and for the powerful rather than of, by, and for the people, then I don’t know what is.”
“This isn’t the first drastic turnaround for the CFPB under Mulvaney. Last month, the agency canned rules that made it harder for payday lenders to make high-interest loans — and automatically pull funds — from borrowers. ‘Mick Mulvaney wants to let Equifax off the hook for its reckless abuse and negligence that may have a lasting impact on millions of Americans,’ [said] Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.”
It’s one more reason why it’s so important to have someone with a track record of protecting consumers running the CFPB, not someone who wants to destroy its work.