" If we’re going to make the investments we need,” remarked President-elect Barack Obama in 2008, “we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t. . . . We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group.” A noble statement, yet we struggle to recall a single program that ceased to exist during the Obama years.

Every president in modern times begins his administration by claiming a righteous desire to cut public expenditures that serve no useful purpose. George W. Bush proposed a bipartisan “sunset review board” to recommend the elimination of unnecessary programs, to little effect.

“We are eliminating programs that are no longer needed,” said Bill Clinton in his first State of the Union address, characteristically merging intention and reality. “We’re slashing subsidies and canceling wasteful projects.”

How many government programs were eliminated under the presidencies of Clinton, Bush, and Obama? Not many. “The nearest earthly approach to immortality on earth is a bureau of the federal government,” Jimmy Byrnes once noted. Total federal spending grew to $3.54 trillion in 2016 from $1.96 trillion in 1993.

Donald Trump’s first budget proposed scores of sizable cuts—a 32 percent cut to the State Department and a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency were two of the largest—and the president deserves credit for actually proposing quantifiable savings instead of merely talking about cuts in the abstract. But his administration has made little effort to get Congress actually to impose such cuts.

This will not be remembered as the year federal outlays began to decrease. But it’s not beyond the capacity of a party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress to eliminate one government entity, a small agency that richly deserves that fate—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It was in fact singled out for abolition in the 2016 Republican platform.

The CFPB was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a law premised on the belief that the global recession was the result of the insufficient regulation of banks. That the recession happened mainly as a result of government policies and government agencies encouraging banks to act foolishly is an argument we will set aside. The CFPB—according to its website—aims “to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices and take action against companies that break the law.” The idea that no federal authority was empowered to perform such functions until 2010 is laughable. Among others, the Bureau of Consumer Protection, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are charged with these purposes. The CFPB is utterly disposable.

It is in the news these days because its Obama-appointed director, Richard Cordray, with his eyes on the prize of Ohio’s governorship, suddenly stepped down on November 24, but not before appointing his own chief of staff, Leandra English, as acting director. Cordray had previously said he would leave at the end of the month, and it was widely known that President Trump was planning to appoint Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to fill the role on an interim basis. Mulvaney is a fierce critic of the CFPB—he’s called it a “sick, sad joke” and pointed out that not only does the agency arrogate other agencies’ authority but it is also largely free of accountability.

Cordray’s publicity stunt generated a day or two of Washington comedy in which two directors were theoretically leading the same agency—one an avowed skeptic of the agency’s raison d’être but bearing donuts; the other a career staffer insisting she was now in charge. English sued, but both the CFPB’s legal counsel and, more importantly, a federal judge ruled that the president had clear statutory authority to make the appointment.

Comedy aside, the CFPB is precisely the sort of agency conservatives should have no trouble eliminating.

It’s little more than a left-wing “consumer rights” nonprofit operating with public money and governmental authority—a kind of Public Citizen with nearly unlimited resources and power. The agency aggressively targets small and mid-sized businesses its agents believe are taking advantage of consumers—particularly local and regional banks—with the result that these institutions must spend more on compliance and legal counsel. Who pays the price for that? Ironically, consumers.

These federal Naderites believe themselves to be unaccountable to the rest of the government. The CFPB’s creators—the Democrats who passed the Dodd-Frank Act on a party-line vote—said they wanted the agency to be “insulated” from political pressures. That may sound high-minded, but government agencies in the American republic are not supposed to be insulated from the people’s representatives. We have national elections every two years for a reason. The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve rather than congressional appropriations, and its presidentially appointed director serves a five-year term (so as not to coincide with any one administration) and can only be removed for cause. In 2016, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the agency’s structure violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. That case is under appeal.

The CFPB takes the intentions of its Democratic founders seriously and for the most part refuses to give Congress answers about its activities. Congressmen haven’t been able to get answers to some very basic questions. How much does the CFPB spend pursuing cases against private-sector firms it believes to be taking advantage of customers? How much does it cost to maintain CFPB offices in some of the nation’s most expensive cities?

Now that Mulvaney leads the agency, we will get answers. Upon taking over, he ordered senior CFPB officials to respond to two questions: What is the CFPB statutorily required to do? And what have you been doing beyond those statutory requirements? The answer to that second question is clear: Quite a bit. Mulvaney intends to end this freelancing. That’s a good start. But there’s more to do.

The House has passed the Financial CHOICE Act, which, like Mulvaney’s plan, would force the CFPB to confine its activities to the enforcement of existing consumer protection laws rather than pursue an ideological war. Other agencies are already charged with enforcing those laws. We see no reason why President Trump shouldn’t push Congress to eliminate the whole gratuitous thing.

Maybe they’ll fail. Maybe Democrats will unite to thwart their efforts. But trying and failing is better than not trying at all. And if they were to succeed, Trump could count the end of the CFPB as a real accomplishment—and one that eluded his predecessors.