Mick Mulvaney, the Trump Administration macher who heads the White House Office of Management and Budget and also serves as the temporary head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been heavily criticized for some remarks he made on Tuesday to an audience of bankers and financial-industry lobbyists. But Mulvaney may have performed a public service by drawing attention to the institutionalized corruption that passes as the business of government in many parts of Washington.

Speaking to a conference organized by the American Bankers Association, Mulvaney recalled that when he was a Republican congressman he only talked to lobbyists who had made contributions to his campaigns, and he encouraged the members of his audience to carry on their work of seeking to influence legislators and policymakers, him included. After Mulvaney’s words created a bit of a storm, his spokesperson weakly claimed that they had been misinterpreted.

One of Mulvaney’s virtues is that, by intention or otherwise, he occasionally tells the truth about what the G.O.P. is up to. Last fall, when many Republicans were insisting their $1.5-trillion tax cut wouldn’t balloon the budget deficit, he stated straight out that creating higher deficits was a key component of the Party’s economic strategy. “We need to have new deficits,” he told CNN. “If we simply look at this as being deficit-neutral, you’re never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain 3 percent economic growth.”

Similarly, Mulvaney hasn’t hidden the Republicans Party’s true desires respecting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a quasi-independent agency that the Obama Administration created, in 2011, to protect people from trickery and finagling on the part of banks and other financial institutions. Gutting the C.F.P.B. has been a long-standing goal of the financial lobby, and Mulvaney spent years signalling his eagerness to bring it about. During his time in Congress, he called the bureau a “sick, sad” joke and co-sponsored legislation that sought to eliminate it.

In November, when Donald Trump appointed him to run the C.F.P.B. on a temporary basis, Mulvaney tempered his rhetoric a bit, but his intention was clear. While he doesn’t have the authority to shutter the bureau, which has about sixteen hundred employees, he quickly put new investigations on hold and scaled back some existing ones, including an effort to go after predatory payday lenders. (My colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar has written about Mulvaney’s plans.) During his speech on Tuesday, Mulvaney outlined other measures he intends to push, including restricting public access to the bureau’s database of consumer complaints. Referring to the legislation that created the agency, he said, “I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government.”

In seeking to curtail the activities of the C.F.P.B., Mulvaney has argued that the agency hampers innovation and growth in the financial sector and elsewhere. There’s no convincing evidence to support this argument, however. Since the banking sector plunged into huge losses after the subprime-mortgage implosion, and the taxpayers bailed it out, its revenues and profits have been steadily recovering. And now, thanks to another assist from Mulvaney and his Republican colleagues, they are at record, or near record, levels.

In recent weeks, the Big Six banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—have reported their financial results for the first three months of 2018. According to a report by the Associated Press, the passage of the Republican tax bill saved them a combined total of $3.6 billion dollars in tax payments during the first quarter and boosted their net profits by an equivalent amount.

Even by Wall Street standards, that’s a chunk of change, and it’s a direct result of the tax bill reducing the corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent. Under the old tax law, after taking various deductions, the Big Six banks paid between twenty-eight per cent and thirty-one per cent of their profits to the U.S. Treasury, the A.P. report said. In the most recent quarter, the banks paid a tax rate of between 17.1 per cent (Goldman Sachs) and 23.7 per cent (Citigroup).

For some reason, Mulvaney didn’t highlight these figures in his speech. At a moment when the Republicans are talking about entitlement reform, and Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is proposing to triple the rents of some of the poorest people in the country, the sight of big banks reporting surges in profits that were fuelled by tax cuts raises alarming moral questions. It also demonstrates how, from Wall Street’s perspective, pouring money into ruling political parties, particularly today’s G.O.P., can be an astute investment.

For a long time now, the FIRE sector, which includes the finance, insurance, and real-estate industries, has been a major source of political contributions. In the 2016 electoral cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, a public-interest watchdog, its denizens donated more than six hundred million dollars to both major parties, with about fifty-four per cent of that total going to Republicans. In the 2018 cycle so far, people in these industries have donated $203.1 million, of which 57.3 per cent has gone to G.O.P. causes and candidates.

With Republicans facing the prospect of losing control of Congress in November, the real intent of Mulvaney’s remarks may have been to encourage bankers and financial-industry lobbyists to pour more money into the G.O.P.’s coffers. And this tactic could work. So far during the Trump Administration, the rate of return on Wall Street’s investment in the Republican Party, the one that Trump claimed he was turning into a workers’ party, has been very high.