Republicans on Capitol Hill have never been fans of the Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The brainchild of one Elizabeth Warren, the agency was created by Dodd-Frank in 2010 to protect consumers from being scammed by credit card companies, ripped off by lenders, harassed by debt collectors, and to protect against other sorts of abuse by financial services businesses. The C.F.P.B. has a consumer-complaint database registering well over 700,000 grievances from unhappy customers who were happy to have a government agency on their side. If you ask the G.O.P., however, the C.F.P.B. is basically the very definition of a dictatorship. While Republicans have been railing against the agency for years, they’ve re-doubled their efforts to slash its funding or shut it down completely since Donald Trump took office. Last month, the House passed the Financial Choice Act, which, as part of its missions to gut financial regulation passed in the wake of the financial crisis, would effectively shackle the C.F.P.B. by no longer allowing the agency to control its own budget, ending its authority to go after “unfair, abusive and deceptive practices,” and having the president appoint its director.

While there is little chance the Choice Act will become law in its current form, this weekend a big target was placed on the C.F.P.B’s back by a powerful Trump ally: Corey Lewandowski, who wants the agency’s head fired. In a Meet the Press interview on Sunday, the former Trump campaign adviser suggested, unprompted, that newly sworn-in White House Chief of Staff John Kelly should make terminating Richard Cordray a top priority given rumors that the C.F.P.B. chief may run for governor in Ohio next year. “He’s a person who is now all but running for governor in the state of Ohio, and he’s sitting in federal office right now,” Lewandowski said. “I hope that the new chief of staff looks at him moving forward and saying it’s time to act decisively.” (Cordray has not said he plans to run to replace John Kasich, whose term will be up in early 2019.)

Lewandowski may have other reasons to want Cordray gone, too. In the same interview, the former lobbyist pointed to a rule issued earlier this month by the C.F.P.B. that would allow customers to sue banks instead of being forced into arbitration—exactly the sort of pro-little guy move that a truly populist administration might favor. Instead, Lewandowski suggested the agency had overstepped and cited the rule as another reason Cordray should be sent packing. “It’s going to be about a trillion dollars’ worth of arbitration that the government’s going to have to go through now,” he said.

It’s not entirely clear why Lewandowski, who is now a Republican operative and commentator, is so up in arms about arbitration costs, of all things, although his past associations might yield a clue. Per Bloomberg:

Lewandowski, who in May left the lobbying and consulting firm he co-founded after the 2016 election, said in the NBC interview that he had no clients who would benefit from Cordray’s removal.