Mick Mulvaney is making sweeping changes to the consumer agency he temporarily leads, including its name.

The symbolic tweak has been overlooked as Mulvaney has pursued numerous other, more concrete changes, such as delaying a major new federal regulation of payday lending.

Yet, it’s an example of the Trump appointee’s talent for pleasing Republicans and ticking off liberals every chance he gets.

From the time its doors opened in 2011, the agency was known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Usually, people just called it “the CFPB.”

Yet those terms, which adorn the agency’s headquarters, make up its website URL, and are used in its Twitter handle, aren’t technically in the law that created the bureau, the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform law. And so Mulvaney changed them.

Late last month, the agency published a blog post announcing that it had devised a new seal for the agency. The seal is a neoclassical emblem similar to other federal agencies’, featuring an eagle and the name of the agency: The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

That, Mulvaney explained during congressional testimony on Wednesday, “is the formal name of the CFPB — the CFPB technically doesn't exist.”

A representative for the agency added Friday that the name change “furthers the acting director’s stated goal of hewing closely to the statute.”

That logic appeals to one of the bureau’s top congressional critics, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling.

“Agencies should follow the law,” the Texas Republican said through a spokesman when asked about the new name. “I commend Acting Director Mulvaney’s efforts to follow the law as written.”

Hensarling worked with Mulvaney when he was a member of the House Financial Services Committee as a representative from South Carolina, before he was made President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and then additionally named the acting director of the CFPB — or BCFP.

And the change may not be only symbolic. Some of the agency’s liberal advocates fear that Mulvaney is risking its brand recognition, undoing the work that's been done to make consumers aware that they can complain to the agency if they have a problem with a mortgage or credit card.

Karl Frisch, executive director of the liberal watchdog group Allied Progress, noted that the bureau has received tens of millions of dollars’ worth of media exposure under the name “CFPB,” and has spent more than $43 million on advertising contracts to promote itself under that name to educate consumers about its existence.

“Only an idiot would walk away from such a successful investment in this brand,” Frisch said. “An idiot or someone who wants to make the CFPB look, feel, and sound more bureaucratic and less like an accessible champion for consumers — something more easily navigated by powerful Wall Street interests than consumers looking for help.”

Putting “bureau,” rather than “consumer,” in the first word of the title “signals you want to take the emphasis away from serving consumers — which unfortunately is what Mulvaney's been doing in many ways — and put it on ‘this is a bureaucracy,’” added Lisa Donner, the executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.

One lobbyist suggested, though, that the media and members of Congress would continue to refer to the agency as the CFPB, meaning that the new logo won’t mean much. After all, that is the branding still on the agency’s homepage and all over its social media presence.

But, asked if Mulvaney aims to change those, too, an agency spokesman declined to comment.