Last November, Mick Mulvaney received a golden opportunity. Thanks to the decision by Richard Cordray to resign from his post as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Donald Trump was able to appoint Mulvaney acting chief of the agency without having to go through the trouble of firing the guy and inadvertently making him a “martyr” for the left, whose obsession with protecting consumers had been working the G.O.P.’s last nerve. Although the dream had always been to simply scrap the organization born out of financial-crisis legislation—something Mulvaney himself attempted to do as a state lawmaker—the budget director was confident that by rolling up his sleeves and getting down to business, he could simply destroy the C.F.P.B. from the inside.

Over the last three months, he’s been hard at work doing just that: in January, he relaxed restrictions that Cordray had imposed on payday lenders, which are known to charge interest in the range of 300 percent (or more). That same month, he ended an investigation into a lender called World Acceptance Corporation, a South Carolina-based company that just so happened to have donated thousands of dollars to Mulvaney’s prior congressional campaigns. In December, it was reported that Mulvaney was reviewing whether or not Wells Fargo, which has made ripping off consumers into a veritable cottage industry, really needed to pay out millions over alleged mortgage abuses. At one point, he edited the C.F.P.B.’s mission statement to say it was designed to address “outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations,” which, obviously, it is not. And just in case it wasn’t completely obvious where he stands, in February we learned that Mulvaney had pulled back from an investigation into how hackers were able to access half of America‘s most sensitive information from credit-reporting agency Equifax’s database. All in all, a very productive few months!

Unfortunately for ol’ Mick, while things have been going quite smoothly, re: rejiggering everything the agency stands for, his path has not been without obstacles. Namely, Senator Elizabeth Warren who, strangely, isn’t thrilled by the fact that the bureau she created is being run by a guy who thinks it’s financial institutions, rather than consumers, that need protecting. In a letter sent January 31, Warren, along with a handful of colleagues, asked Mulvaney to explain exactly what he thinks he’s doing. In response, Mulvaney chose not only to not answer any of the group’s questions, but to write this—just to Warren and not her fellow lawmakers, in case anyone doubted that this is personal:

I reject your insinuation—repeated three times in as many pages—that my actions as Acting Director are based on considerations other than a careful examination of the law and facts particular to any matter.