Don’t get me wrong: the Trump Administration’s efforts to debilitate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with the connivance of the Republican Congress, are deeply upsetting for a whole spectrum of reasons. Coming so soon after the 2008 financial crisis and so early in the existence of the CFPB, they suggest a boldness to the financial sector and its apologists; the GOP seems to be betting on a public amnesia about why such an agency is needed. This subversion is unsettling as well due to the fact that Democratic supporters of the CFPB are totally shut out from the levers of national power and so unable to do anything directly to stop the damage. Most disturbing, though, is the prospect of millions of Americans losing a vital line of defense between their efforts to make better lives for themselves and those who would seek to exploit and rip off the citizenry, on fronts ranging from college and payday loans to mortgages and banking fees. It’s also important to acknowledge the long-term harm being done to the agency, as committed public service agents understandably choose to depart from an agency no longer permitted to perform its mandated work on behalf of the public. Here's how The New York Times summarizes the rollback:
Since taking over in November, [interim director Mick Mulvaney] has halted all new investigations, frozen hiring, stopped data collection and proposed cutting off public access to a database of consumer complaints. He dropped most cases against payday lenders — a primary focus of the consumer bureau — and also proposed scrapping a new rule that would have heightened scrutiny of an industry accused of trapping vulnerable customers in a cycle of debt. And he has tried hard to persuade Congress to take away funding authority for the bureau from the Federal Reserve — so that Congress can cut it.
On top of this, Mulvaney just this past week directed the CFPB to move the student loan division into the consumer information unit, which appears to have the objective of scrapping the bureau’s efforts to actively protect recipients of student loans. Taken together, these moves are changing the CFPB from a watchdog to an ineffectual role not recognizable in the legislation that created it. The sabotage — which has been telegraphed unambiguously by the Trump administration — is well underway.
But though the immediate damage to citizens is real and growing, this is not a moment for despair, or clucking over the depravity of Republicans, but rather a time to leverage their ill-advised and anti-consumer moves into a moral truncheon with which to politically bludgeon the GOP in the 2018 elections and beyond. Their short-lived gains are our long-term opportunity; Mick Mulvaney would be well-advised to refresh his understanding of the term “Pyrrhic victory.”
The overeager effort to hobble the CFPB in itself constitutes an obvious betrayal and subversion of the bureau’s legislated mission to protect American consumers against unethical behavior by financial entities. Moves to undermine the bureau repudiate the public good in favor of the powerful in ways that most people can easily grasp. Does the average American really think the problem with our country is that ordinary people have too much power and giant banks have too little? Republican complaints of the CFPB's allegedly aggressive moves against financial firms are easily fact-checked, and can be weighed against the abuses financial entities have committed against literally thousands upon thousands of Americans. For whatever mix of hubris and ideological blinders, Mulvaney and his ilk see no need to hide what they’re doing. They appear think that power lets you do whatever you want, without consequences. This blindness has left proponents of the CFPB with no shortage of egregious actions to bring to sympathetic public attention.
In a broader sense, one can see how the CFPB is so threatening to the GOP because it’s an unambiguous example of the government serving the public good. The New York Times notes that the CFPB is “an Obama-era watchdog agency vilified by Republicans since its inception as an example of government overreach.” Yet the GOP sees “government overreach” in literally any attempt by the American people to use democratic processes to pass laws to serve the public good. This position has little or nothing in common with a democratic party, and more with one whose sole constituency is corporate interests. In this sense, attacks on the CFPB may serve a short-term goal of helping the GOP's true constituents, and a strategic goal of undermining a vision of a pro-citizen government, but these efforts are so transparently self-serving that a canny opposition would do well to turn them back against the GOP as more proof of where the party’s true loyalties lie.
Gleeful destruction of an agency explicitly created to help ordinary Americans exposes the GOP’s highest priorities. Remember — Mick Mulvaney is not really a “longtime critic” of the CFPB, as The New York Times describes him, at least not in the sense of someone who offers a useful critique. Mulvaney and the GOP are fundamentally, irretrievably opposed to the very existence of the CFPB. There is no nuance to their favoring the powerful over the vulnerable. In opposing the CFPB so vigorously, the GOP has hacked away at its ability to occupy any middle ground; instead, it reinforces opponents’ ability to describe them (accurately) as an extremist party.
The myriad attempts to undermine the CFPB collectively manage to affect millions of Americans across the political spectrum, in ways that, again, may allow the GOP to serve its donors in the short term, but which pose the possibility of real long-term damage to the party's capacity to claim to serve the public interest. Mulvaney’s efforts to undo student loan protection efforts may be the poster child for this flaw in their master plan. Deciding to essentially stick it to a voting populace in the formative years of its political identity in a way that leaves no doubt as to which party hates students seems awfully dismissive of the millions of votes this group will be casting, not just in 2018, but in literally elections for the next half century. Making the case that lenders shouldn’t be able to rip off and exploit people pursuing the American dream of receiving a college degree is easy; defending such practices is foolhardy, bordering on political malpractice — unless, of course, the campaign donations you receive from lenders is more important than protecting the students you’re elected to serve. But America is the land of freedom, after all, and I suppose members of the GOP are free to make self-defeating and morally indefensible choices all they want.
It’s fair to take a little comfort in viewing the current situation as a successful stress test of the CFPB and its very reason for being. Over its seven years of existence, we have already seen that the bureau works to serve the public interest. The concerted effort to undo it provides yet more evidence for why we really need it. The GOP is in the unenviable position not of stopping a piece of legislation with theoretical dangers, but of trying to make the case, against all evidence, against an agency that has already accomplished the public good it was designed to. A bureau with this many of the right enemies is obviously doing its job. It shows what a threat the CFPB is to financial corruption and the desire of powerful interests to exploit Americans for financial gain.
The Times notes that “Mr. Mulvaney’s approach is finding favor with the person who may matter the most: the president. Mr. Trump, several administration aides said, is delighted at the idea of Ms. Warren watching an institution she spent years building being undermined from within — and eager to see Mr. Mulvaney continue waging a battle to reduce federal regulations through the Office of Management and Budget.” So Mulvaney’s efforts to hobble the CFPB are tied up with Donald Trump’s personal animus toward Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who initially conceived of the such a bureau and was heavily involved with its creation. However, the president’s adherence to a politics of personalities and revenge swaddles him from grasping the full repercussions here - he may think he’s screwing over Elizabeth Warren, but he seems genuinely ignorant of the additional fact that he’s also screwing over the millions of Americans protected by the CFPB - millions and millions of registered voters, to borrow a phrase from the original Ghostbusters.
So it's a little ironic that Mulvaney himself provides plenty of opportunity for Democrats to personalize the battle over the CFPB. Apparently pushed to the margins in debates around the federal budget — which his actual full-time job as OMB director would normally focus on — he seems to be using his interim appointment to the CFPB to let out some aggression and go a bit hog wild. Unfortunately for his cause, his pretensions to be defending big business against rampaging consumers on some sort of intellectual principle has been undermined by his recent declaration that, as a congressman, he only met with lobbyists who had donated money to him. He has tried to mitigate these remarks by pointing out that he always met with constituents, whether or not they had given him money, but this only seems to reinforce the awful impression of ethical looseness.
Additinally, Mulvaney has lied to Congress about his contacts with payday lenders, falsely telling Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio that his only such contacts were in the ordinary course of business, when in fact such interaction occurred on at least one other occasion. Given the plethora of scandals embroiling such Trump administration luminaries as Scott “If It Appears to be Unethical, Just Do It!” Pruitt and departed folks like Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, it’s seems worth inquiring what shenanigans Mulvaney has gotten up to in his efforts to curry favor with financial entities. Mulvaney may currently be the form of the CFPB’s destruction, but his upside-down logic (banks are oppressed!) and dubious personal history threaten to turn him instead into one more good argument for why we need the CFPB in the first place.
