Only in Washington would an argument erupt over a federal agency’s acronym.

To progressives, the agency is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the CFPB, which took on Wall Street and won compensation for more than 27 million consumers during its startup years under former Director Richard Cordray.

To conservatives, it is the overly powerful Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or the BCFP, which is its legal name.

Conservatives say the bureau has frequently overstepped its bounds and Republicans will rein it in, starting with calling it by its legal name, said Norbert Michel, a senior fellow in the study of financial services at Heritage Foundation.

“They’re making the point that what’s in the statute is what they should be doing,” he said, acknowledging it won’t be easy. “I can’t even say it,” he said of BCFP. “I trip over it if I try to say it the other way. I mess it all up. So I just keep saying CFPB.”