An Agency to Ax

Former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who briefly served as its acting director under Trump, argues that the new Trump Administration should try to shut down Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Although, as most better conservatives do, he erroneously regards some level of economic regulation as legitimate, he correctly singles this agency out as a particularly deserving target: It is unaccountable to other government officials (and thus to the people), and so it predictably became drunk with power outside its nominal scope:

Modified from image by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Thus it was, for example, that the CFPB set out to regulate automobile dealerships, even though it was explicitly prohibited -- in statute -- from doing so.

And that it started engaging in "regulation by enforcement": Filing lawsuits against financial service providers for past practices as a means of announcing that something that had been permissible would be illegal going forward.

And its participation in various manifestations of Operation Chokepoint, whereby banks were discouraged from providing services to entirely legal businesses -- pawn shops and gun manufacturers, for example -- because Democrats simply didn't like them.

And by sending "civil investigative demands" -- basically taxpayer-funded fishing expeditions -- to financial service businesses, without telling them what they were being investigated for.

Mulvaney explains why the first Trump Administration didn't shut the agency down outright, and correctly notes that as long as it exists, it has the potential to become just as abusive again.

This said, Mulvaney does not pretend the goal of shutting down the agency will be easy. But he is right to indicate the opportunity, given the history of the CFPB, the gratefulness of business leaders for having had it reined in before, and the current mood of attempting big changes.

This is one thing I'd be glad to see Trump accomplish.

-- CAV