Mulvaney fires 25-member consumer protection board

WASHINGTON — Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, fired the agency’s 25-member advisory board Wednesday, days after some of its members criticized his leadership of the watchdog agency.

The CFPB said it will revamp the Consumer Advisory Board, known as the CAB, in the fall with all new members.

The panel has traditionally played an influential role in advising the CFPB’s leadership on new regulations and policies.

On Monday, 11 CAB members held a news conference and criticized Mulvaney for canceling legally required meetings with the group.

On Wednesday, group members were notified that they were being replaced — and that they could not reapply for spots on the new board.

The dismissal of the members is likely to exacerbate concerns among Democrats that Mulvaney is weakening the consumer watchdog.

“Mick Mulvaney has no intention of putting consumers above financial firms that cheat them,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who helped conceive of the bureau, said in a statement.

Firing current members of the advisory board is a huge red flag in this administration’s ongoing erosion of critical consumer financial protections that help average families,” said Chi Chi Wu, an attorney for the National Consumer Law Center who has been a board member since 2016.

The Consumer Advisory Board is required under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law. Members also included the head of retail banking at Citi, the founder of NerdWallet and a director at Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center. Members of two other boards — the Community Bank Advisory Council and the Credit Union Advisory Council — were also dismissed.

In a 30-minute call Wednesday morning to announce the move, a CFPB official sparred with some board members surprised by the decision. “We’ve decided we’re going to start the advisory groups with new membership,” said Anthony Welcher, the CFPB’s policy associate director for external affairs, according to a recording of the call obtained by the Post.