What are they having at consumer agency? A lot of alphabet soup
NEW YORK — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is dead. Long live the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.
That's the message the Trump administration is pushing, at least, in what on the surface seems like a minor tweak to the name of the federal consumer watchdog agency created after the Great Recession to protect consumers against banks, credit card companies, debt collectors and other financial companies.
But critics see it as a not-sosubtle effort to telegraph the abrupt ideological turn the bureau has taken since Trump-appointee Mick Mulvaney became acting director last year. Under Mulvaney, the bureau has proposed revisiting or rolling back the rules, regulations and policies that the Obama administration put into place when it controlled the agency. The bureau has dramatically cut back on enforcement actions as well.
The Dodd-Frank Act created a “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection” in 2010. But, except for the occasional court filing, the bureau was consistently referred to as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.
Mulvaney took over the bureau as acting director in late November, when Obama appointee Richard Cordray resigned. Since then, the bureau has increasingly referred to itself as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or by the acronym BCFP.
During testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Mulvaney said, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does not exist.”
But 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.
Republican lawmakers, who have long had issues with the bureau, have been happy to go along with the name change. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Dallas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement, “I commend Acting Director Mulvaney's efforts to follow the law as written.”