New agency head vows protection

‘We absolutely will put consumers first’ in decisions, she promises.

WASHINGTON — The new head of the U.S. consumer watchdog agency says she doesn’t have immediate targets in mind for rolling back actions taken by her controversial predecessor, and will put protecting consumers in the forefront while also encouraging financial innovation.

Kathy Kraninger, nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate last week on a narrow, party-line vote, has replaced Mick Mulvaney as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Mulvaney, named by Trump as acting director a year ago, had been a vocal critic of the agency and made deep changes to it. He proposed cutting back many of the CFPB’s rules put in place during the Obama administration and scaled back its enforcement efforts.

“We absolutely will put consumers first in the decisions that I will make,” Kraninger said Tuesday.

A leading priority will be the security and privacy of data, what the agency collects from consumers and what it stores, she said.

Extensive review and consultation will come before those decisions are made, Kraninger said. “I want to understand why and how something was done before.”

Many observers expect Kraninger to run the agency in a similar industry-friendly way to Mulvaney’s.

Kraninger is taking up a fiveyear term as CFPB director. She worked as a mid-level official in the White House budget office, most recently under Mulvaney, who remains its head. Kraninger has no experience in financial services and had never run a federal agency before — prompting Democratic lawmakers to oppose her nomination.

Mulvaney’s actions spurred the departure of many high-level staff members at the agency, including deputy director Leandra English and Seth Frotman, who was the top official overseeing student loan issues.

Mulvaney hired several Republican political operatives to oversee nearly all parts of the agency’s operations.

Kraninger said there are “appropriate roles” for both career staff and political appointees at the CFPB.

She didn’t reject outright Mulvaney’s view that the CFPB under Obama appointee Richard Cordray had overreached in its enforcement actions against companies selling financial products and services.

Kraninger