It began, as so many other things that subsequently have metastasized within the republic did, in the administration of Ronald Reagan. In 1981, President Reagan appointed a woman named Anne Gorsuch to run the Environmental Protection Agency. It did not take long to become clear to the professionals at EPA that Gorsuch had been appointed specifically to cripple the institution of which she was in charge, in keeping with the Reagan administration's hostility to environmental legislation in general, and environmental regulation in specific. From the Washington Post:

As a result, she slashed the EPA’s budget by nearly a quarter and, according to a Washington Post story at the time, boasted that she had reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half inch. She filled various departments at EPA with subordinates recruited from the very industries the agency was supposed to be regulating...

Budget cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency will strip 3,200 personnel of their jobs by the end of 1983, eliminating 30 percent of the agency’s 10,380 employees at a cost of $17.6 million just for severance pay. The cuts are so massive that they could mean a basic retreat on all the environmental programs of the past 10 years, according to agency sources and administration critics. At the same time, divisions between Administrator Anne M. Gorsuch and career agency staff over her approach to policymaking have all but reached open warfare...

“Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies in government,” read a New York Times editorial in early 1983. “She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.” Gorsuch’s credibility, and that of other top EPA leaders, was in tatters. And the debacle reflected poorly on Reagan, who eventually forced her to step down.



This was in keeping with other Reagan Administration efforts to roll back progressive reforms passed in the previous decades. Attorney General William French Smith reversed Justice Department policies on civil rights and on a host of other issues. At HUD, "Silent" Sam Pierce eviscerated the loan program for low-income housing. And, as also has been the case, when the Republicans find a play that works, they stick with it.

Ann Gorsuch, mother of SCOTUS Neil, addresses reporters. Bettmann Getty Images

Which brings us to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Senator Professor Warren, an agency that has returned billions of dollars to citizens swindled, burgled, or double-talked out of their money by large financial institutions. The Republicans—and, especially, their donor class—hated the CFPB and vowed to bring it down at the first opportunity. They got one with the election of the current president*, who quickly put Mick Mulvaney in charge of it. And it was Mulvaney's primary task to hollow out the CFPB's essential functions.

In an upcoming New York Times Magazine, Nick Confessore provides a definitive account of how well this strategy still works.

Mulvaney’s careful campaign of deconstruction offers a case study in the Trump administration’s approach to transforming Washington, one in which strategic neglect and bureaucratic self-sabotage create versions of agencies that seem to run contrary to their basic premises. According to one person who speaks with Mulvaney often, his smooth subdual of the C.F.P.B. was part of his pitch to Trump for his promotion to White House chief of staff — long one of the most powerful jobs in Washington. Mulvaney’s slow-rolling attack on the bureau’s enforcement and regulatory powers wasn’t just one of the Trump era’s most emblematic assaults on the so-called administrative state. It was also, in part, an audition.



Confessore goes deep on how the CFPB was developed and, more to the point, why it was developed in the first place.



Some of the largest payday lenders built national franchises and took their companies public during the frothy 2000s, fueling further expansion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists stepped in, building lead-generation databases and online platforms to compete against traditional storefront lenders. So did Wall Street. In recent years, leading private-equity firms, including Golden Gate Capital and the Fortress Investment Group, have acquired or bought stakes in almost two dozen short-term lenders. Payday lenders, which once operated on the fringes of the financial world, are now in unlikely alignment with the titans of high finance: Each has benefited enormously from Trump’s deregulatory policies, which Trump has cast as populist and his likely 2020 opponents have assailed as plutocratic.



(He also demonstrates that Mick Mulvaney, the administration*'s button man on this particular hit job, is a self-aggrandizing clown: "In the Senate, Mulvaney belonged to a small group of young conservatives who called themselves the William Wallace Caucus, after the Scottish freedom fighter portrayed in 'Braveheart.'" Yeesh.)



Mulvaney is pictured at the White House, looking every bit the William Wallace freedom fighter. Alex Wong Getty Images

The piece also clearly shows that the CFPB's primary enemy, and the primary force seeking its emasculation, was the billion-dollar payday loan business, an industry that feeds on the carrion of human financial misery and fiscal destruction. The CFPB went to war with these vultures, and the industry struck back, hard, when this administration* took office. Mulvaney was its instrument, and his first order of business was to make sure that up was down and black was white.



To become less political, Mulvaney decided, the bureau would first have to become more political. Each of the senior career officials in charge of the bureau’s divisions, who had the title of associate director, would get a Mulvaney-appointed twin, known as a policy associate director, or PAD. To lead the PADs, Mulvaney hired Brian Johnson, a senior Hensarling aide who had helped lead the inquisition of Cordray’s bureau. In his old job, Johnson helped draft a report — titled “Unsafe at Any Bureaucracy” — alleging that the bureau used shoddy statistics and legally questionable tactics to prosecute auto lenders accused of having racially discriminated against car buyers.

In his new job, Johnson quoted Adam Smith and attacked what he called “paternalistic” policies. According to two former staff members, Johnson, citing an overlooked subsection of Dodd-Frank, soon revised a boilerplate description of the bureau’s mission that was appended to the bottom of news releases. It would henceforth include a reference to eliminating “unduly burdensome regulations.”



Then, it was on to Mulvaney's true mission—making America once again safe for bloodsucking opportunists. The first test case was an outfit called Golden Valley, which specialized in euchring Native Americans out of what little money they had.



The Golden Valley lawsuit was a product of Cordray’s enforcement strategy against scofflaw lenders. According to the bureau’s complaint, Golden Valley and three other lenders were technically owned by the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake, a California tribe, but were largely run out of a call center in Kansas. The lenders made payday loans over the internet, claiming that tribal ownership allowed the firm to ignore usury laws in states where its triple-digit interest rates were illegal. Using a legal theory the bureau had successfully employed in earlier cases — that trying to collect on illegal loans is itself a deceptive business practice under Dodd-Frank — the bureau filed suit against Golden Valley and the other lenders in the spring of 2017. The sudden withdrawal mystified and worried other lawyers in the division, who wondered what implications it held for their own cases.



And then the evisceration began.



In a memo that spring, he announced the creation of new bureau offices dedicated to “cost-benefit analysis” and “innovation.” Technically, neither office was prescribed by Dodd-Frank. Almost as an afterthought, Mulvaney effectively dissolved the student-loan ombudsman’s office — a position that was mandated by Dodd-Frank. A Mulvaney spokesman told reporters that the reorganization was a “very modest organizational chart change.” But on the same day, Mulvaney signaled that the bureau would scale back a long-awaited overhaul of student-lending rules. Last August, the ombudsman, a Cordray veteran named Seth Frotman, quit in protest, accusing Mulvaney of ignoring Dodd-Frank’s intent. “It felt like we were in some Ayn Rand debate club,” Frotman told me recently.



This is an excellent piece of explanatory journalism, something at which the Times—and Confessore—excel. It is a clear look at how institutions that protect ordinary Americans get weakened so that the laws that created them become fundamentally dead letters. As we have noted, it is nothing new in conservative Republican politics, and it is further proof that this problem is deeper than the current president* and that it likely will persist after he mercifully is forced to leave office.

Will the Republican Party continue to make America great again for plutocrats and monied thieves? Will the Democratic Party continue to be at best impotent, or, at worst, complicit in that effort? Those are the larger stakes in everything that will happen between now and November of 2020.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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