Warren, Mulvaney collide in person
WASHINGTON — After months of letter writing and political one-liners, two of Washington’s most strident adversaries met Thursday to debate the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
On one side was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, DMass., who came up with the idea for the watchdog agency and has been among its most vocal supporters in Congress. On the other was Mick Mulvaney, who spent years criticizing the bureau as rogue agency that needed to be reined in before President Donald Trump appointed him in November to be its temporary leader.
Warren questioned Mulvaney’s fitness to run the agency, given the numerous times he had voted to get rid of the bureau
as a Republican congressman from South Carolina.
“In 2012, you voted in favor of a Republican budget that called for eliminating the agency entirely. Is that right?” Warren asked.
Mulvaney said he didn’t have a “specific recollection” but that it “sounds familiar to me.”
In Washington, it is common for lawmakers to clash with the leaders of large government agencies. The fight between Mulvaney and Warren is unique in part because neither side is typical. Mulvaney is not just a bureaucrat but the White House budget director, who has also been rumored to be in the running for the next chief of staff. Warren is not just a senator but the brains behind the bureau and often rumored to be a potential 2020 presidential candidate.
The clash has helped put the bureau at the center of a debate over the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back financial regulations. Since taking control of the agency, Mulvaney has promised it would adopt a more humble approach and not push the envelope as Republicans complained it had done during the Obama administration. He recently proposed stripping the bureau of some of its power and making its less independent of Congress, exasperating Democrats such as Warren.
Part of Mulvaney’s mission, it appears, has also been to disentangle the bureau from Warren, the person perhaps most closely associated with it. After helping set up the agency after the global financial crisis, Warren was widely seen as a leading candidate to be its first director but was passed over after the Obama administration worried Republicans would hold up her nomination. Even after moving on to the Senate, Warren has remained closely tied to the bureau.
“I don’t want us to be Elizabeth Warren’s baby,” Mulvaney said at a conference of community bankers earlier this week. “Because as long as you’re associated with one person, be it me or her, you’re never going to be taken as seriously as a bureaucracy, as an oversight regulator, as you probably should.”
Mulvaney sometimes appears to relish his role as Warren’s foil.
“All the stuff that you’ve read about me and the CFPB, I urge you to take with a grain of salt — except the part about me keeping Elizabeth Warren up at night,” Mulvaney told a group of state attorneys general in February.
At Thursday’s hearing, Warren lashed out at Mulvaney over those remarks.
“You’ve taken obvious joy in talking about how the agency will help banks a lot more than it will help consumers and how upset this must make me. But here’s what you don’t get, Mr. Mulvaney: This isn’t about me,” Warren said. “You are hurting real people to score cheap political points.”