Two acting directors face off in court case

Judge was perhaps only person in D.C. who did not rush to issue an opinion on dueling bureau heads

WASHINGTON — On Monday, Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, brought in doughnuts for employees. Around the same time, Leandra English, the agency’s other acting director, sent an all-staff email thanking the workforce for its service. Awkward. And so unfolded another frenetic workday in this corner of a capital city defined by hyperpartisan dysfunction: Two public servants — one a holdover from the Obama administration, the other a rushed temporary appointee by President Donald Trump — messily and publicly vied to lead an agency that has fought for consumers while under political assault by Republicans. Its future as an independent agency rests on who leads it next.

By the end of the day, a federal judge was assigned to hear English’s request, filed late Sunday, to provide an emergency restraining order to block the president from appointing Mulvaney. Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed in September, was perhaps the only person in the capital who refrained from rushing to issue an opinion.

At a hurriedly called and packed-tothe-gills hearing, Kelly voiced his concerns, noting that lawyers for the president could not definitively say whether English was protected from losing her job. The judge also said that neither set of attorneys had addressed whether Mulvaney, who is also the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, “can wear two hats.”

Yet the judge remarked that he was essentially being asked by Deepak Gupta, English’s lawyer, to overrule the president’s power to appoint a new director. “That’s an extraordinary remedy,” Kelly said, before asking Trump’s lawyers to respond to English’s complaint with their own brief by the end of the evening.

Others, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., reiterated that the bureau was meant to be independent from political influence. She defended English as the rightful director of the bureau that has helped nearly 30 million U.S. consumers collect almost $12 billion in refunds and canceled debts.

“The agency was built to be as far away from partisan politics as humanely possible — including exactly what Donald Trump is doing now,” said Warren, who proposed the bureau in 2007.

“The DNA of this agency is to work for America’s families and to stand up to big Wall Street banks,” Warren said. “Mick Mulvaney wants to work for Wall Street banks and step on American families.”

It was the latest hill on a bureaucratic roller coaster that began with the abrupt departure on Friday of Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee who helped the agency aggressively expand its powers to punish rule-breaking companies. Cordray named English as his acting deputy director and presumed acting director. The White House responded forcefully by saying Mulvaney would be in control until Trump decided on a permanent successor, whose confirmation could take months.

On Sunday evening, English filed a lawsuit against Trump and Mulvaney, who is named in the lawsuit as “claiming to be acting director” of the agency.

Established under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and adopting an aggressive agenda under the Obama administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau targets financial companies for practices that it considers unfair or abusive.