There was some surprise, last week, when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a $1 billion fine against Wells Fargo for mortgage- and loan-related abuses. Acting C.F.P.B. Director Mick Mulvaney, after all, has all but gutted the agency in his five short months there, freezing all new investigations into financial companies and effectively refusing to punish any malefactors in its sights. Had Mulvaney, who previously sponsored legislation to get rid of the bureau and called it a “sick, sad joke,” had a change of heart? On Tuesday, clearly sensing those questions were in the air, Mulvaney set the record straight: he still fully believes the C.F.P.B. does way too much for consumers, and to prove it, he told a room full of bankers exactly how to bend his sad shell of an agency to their will.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney said at an American Bankers Association conference, where 1,300 bankers and lending-industry officials had gathered to hear him speak. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” A spokesperson would later half-heartedly claim that this was taken out of context, but it wasn’t a slip of the tongue—he literally believes this is how the government should run. Manipulating lawmakers with campaign contributions is one of the “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy,” Mulvaney explained. “And you have to continue to do it.”

Mulvaney, who also runs the White House Office of Management and Budget, would know. As a congressman from South Carolina, Mulvaney received almost $63,000 from payday lenders. When he took over the C.F.P.B., one of his first moves was to pay it forward by declaring open season on vulnerable debtors stuck paying usurious fees to white-collar loan sharks. In January, he directed the C.F.P.B. to drop its lawsuit against a group of lenders in Kansas who were allegedly charging interest rates as high as 950 percent. The bureau did not give any explanation. (“He seems extremely reasonable,” the founder of a top payday-lending lobbying group told The New York Times in February, as industry leaders prepared to celebrate their good fortune with a retreat at the Trump National Doral Golf Club.)

In addition to encouraging this pay-for-play scheme, Mulvaney helpfully detailed other ways he plans to protect banks from whiny consumers. Noting that the agency will likely shut down public access to a Web portal that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to log complaints against financial companies, Mulvaney told the audience, “I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government.”

Oh, and just so there is absolutely no confusion on where Mulvaney stands?

Mulvaney also said he would begin calling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by its official statutory name, the more obscure Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Administration officials said the rebranding was an attempt to diminish the agency’s public profile.