Smack down: “If only the CFPB had any meaningful accountability to Congress…”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is fighting mad. Her pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is completely out of her control, and she’s taken to Twitter to express her latest dissatisfaction with Trump-appointed CFPB head Mick Mulvaney.



For background on Warren’s resistance to President Trump’s pick, see our prior posts:

Warren was instrumental in assuring that the CFPB operate without Congressional oversight and its director, unlike members of the Cabinet, do not serve at the pleasure of the president and can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Warren has taken to Twitter to complain . . . apparently forgetting her own role in the very lack of Congressional oversight she’s attacking.

Since assuming control of the @CFPB, @MickMulvaneyOMB has done favor after favor for payday lenders and the banking industry without any legal justification – and he won’t answer basic questions about his actions. https://t.co/WNW62Qhb6s — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 16, 2018

The Washington Examiner reports:

Liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded answers from Mick Mulvaney about his management of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Friday, specifically about his oversight of banks, payday lenders and college credit cards. The Massachusetts Democrat already has gone a few rounds with the Trump acting director over his brief tenure at the CFPB, the regulatory agency she helped create. On Friday she sent him another letter, this one 17 pages long, demanding responses to 105 questions that she and other senators had asked in nine previous letters without receiving satisfactory answers. “”That is an unacceptable track record for a public official,” Warren wrote. She also accused him of rolling back consumer protections, undermining the non-political staff at the CFPB, and undermining the bureau’s independence.

I’m giving @MickMulvaneyOMB one last chance to answer my questions about his actions at the @CFPB. If he won’t, he should be called immediately to testify under oath before my colleagues and me on the Senate Banking Committee. https://t.co/GguCdiWaLM — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 16, 2018

It’s hard to tell whether or not this is political grandstanding with 2020 in mind, or if she is seriously miffed that the CFPB doesn’t answer to Congress. Either way or both ways, it’s hilarious.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board has this to say:

Twitter is often the intellectual equivalent of a tavern at 2 a.m., but it has illuminating moments. An example came Friday when Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard populist, offered a hilarious commentary on her proudest political accomplishment—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “I’m giving @MickMulvaneyOMB one last chance to answer my questions about his actions at the @CFPB. If he won’t, he should be called immediately to testify under oath before my colleagues and me on the Senate Banking Committee,” the Senator thundered to her 4.3 million Twitter followers. Mick Mulvaney is the acting head of the CFPB, and it seems he is not suitably attentive to Ms. Warren’s demands. Like Donald Trump, Ms. Warren might want to let an editor see her tweets before she sends them. Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute quickly responded to Ms. Warren by tweeting, “If only the CFPB had any meaningful accountability to Congress . . .”

If only the CFPB had any meaningful accountability to Congress… https://t.co/e9wUsrhW7M — Iain Murray (Competitive Enterprise Institute) (@ismurray) March 16, 2018

Someone get the smelling salts because Ms. Warren is down for the count. As Mr. Murray and readers of these columns know, Ms. Warren designed the CFPB as an independent agency like no other precisely so it could ignore Congress. The bureau is funded not with an annual appropriation like the rest of the government, but by the Federal Reserve based on a request from the head of the CFPB. Congress thus can’t use its constitutional power of the purse to enforce public accountability.

Here’s a good question:

Does it seem like both democrats and republicans take actions when in the majority that assume they’ll never again be in the minority? Are they just myopic, or is there some tactical logic I’m missing? https://t.co/8yiWgfLPwr — Clifford Asness (@CliffordAsness) March 17, 2018



