Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney just savaged the federal agency President Donald Trump recently put him in charge of during his first press conference as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Mulvaney, who has long criticized the CFPB, doubled down on his hatred of the agency which was enacted in 2011 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations passed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn.
“Yeah, my opinion of the structure of CFPB has not changed,” Mulvaney said. “I still think it is an awful example of a bureaucracy that has gone wrong. It is almost entirely unaccountable to the people who are supposed to oversee it or pay for it.”
“I still have the same fundamental principled misgivings about the way this bureau is structured,” Mulvaney said. “I think it is wrong to have a completely unaccountable federal bureaucracy. I think it’s completely wrong.”
“I’m just learning about the powers that I have as acting director,” he added. “They would frighten most of you. They would probably worry you to think about how little oversight Congress has over me now as I’m the director, how little oversight the committees have over how CFPB functions.”
Mulvaney is currently embroiled in a fight over who is to succeed former CFPB head Richard Cordray, who resigned last Friday. Cordray named his chief of staff, Leandra English, as the new acting director of the agency, but Trump tapped Mulvaney to serve in that role instead. On Sunday, English reportedly filed a lawsuit against Trump and Mulvaney in an attempt the thawrt the president’s pick and assert herself as acting director.
During Monday’s presser, Mulvaney said the succession challenge is unsurprising given the nature of the agency and how little oversight it has.
“If you really studied the constitutional nature of our government, you’ve studied the way that the bureaucracy is supposed to work, it would both frighten and disturb you that this agency is as independent as it is,” he said.
