The problem for Mulvaney is that even though all of these facts were as true under President Obama as they are today, Republican politicians made this brand of criticizing lavish, fat-cat salaries an integral part of their crusade against the Bureau's mission. "Five percent of its employees are out-earning U.S. cabinet secretaries by raking in $200,000 or more annually," wrote Randy Neguebauer, who sat on the House Financial Services Committee alongside Mulvaney, in a 2012 op-ed. Two years later, Committee chair Jeb Hensarling referred to the practice of entrusting consumer protection to "unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats... whose average salary is over $175,000" as "arrogant," "unfair," and "abusive." Right-wing blogs seized on this narrative, burying details about the pay schedule deep in articles lambasting the "gravy train" at "Elizabeth Warren's consumer agency." A search for articles covering the aforementioned gravy train at Mick Mulvaney's consumer agency, curiously, yields no analogous results.

Mulvaney pitches himself as an ideologue, the type of anti-regulation zealot who asked for zero dollars to fund the Bureau's work, citing the mutual responsibility of its employees to be "responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars." (The payday lending industry's substantial contributions to his congressional campaigns, he says, play no role in his day-to-day decision-making processes.) I do not doubt that he loathes the CFPB as much as he says he does, or that to him, the most meaningful accomplishment of his tenure as its director would be shutting it down for good.

The choices he has made in the meantime, though, share their roots with every other spending scandal that plagues the Trump White House: It is led by a man who pledged to fix Washington's culture of corruption and self-dealing, but who has yet to demonstrate any interest in actually doing so, or even in articulating a clear vision of what that process might look like. And since they know they won't be held responsible for failing to deliver on this promise, a startling number of self-proclaimed spendthrifts—Pruitt and Carson and Zinke and Price and Shulkin and Mulvaney—figure that in the meantime, they might as well avail themselves of the job's various perks. Draining the swamp requires climbing in it first, and right now, the people who work for Donald Trump are enjoying a good soak.