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Sen. Ron Johnson says woman who claims to be acting chief ‘burrowed’ into agencyA top Republican demanded answers Wednesday on how Leandra English, the woman Democrats are pushing to be acting director of the government’s top consumer advocacy agency, managed to “burrow” into her job and outlast the Obama administration. Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Ms. English held a political job at the Office of Personnel Management but managed to convert herself to a career civil service position early this year at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The process is called “burrowing,”...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led a protest Tuesday against President Trump’s decision to appoint a new leader for an agency tasked with regulating banks and other financial institutions, instead of relying on the newly appointed deputy director. “For six years, this agency has fought for working people, and now it is time for us to fight for the agency,” Warren said Tuesday at a protest rally outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit from an official who claims that she, and not President Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney, is the rightful director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Timothy Berry of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia declined to grant Leandra English a restraining order to bar Mulvaney from serving as the CFPB’s acting director.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney just savaged the federal agency President Donald Trump recently put him in charge of during his first press conference as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney, who has long criticized the CFPB, doubled down on his hatred of the agency which was enacted in 2011 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations passed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn. “Yeah, my opinion of the structure of CFPB has not changed,” Mulvaney said. “I still think it is an awful example of a bureaucracy that has gone wrong. It...

Secret donors are financing the lawsuit against President Donald Trump and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney over who runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Deepak Gupta, the lead lawyer of a boutique law firm that launched its suit on behalf of CFPB acting director Leandra English, confirmed in a CNBC interview that English is not paying for his hourly fees, but rather unknown anonymous donors are. Gupta refused to name who is funding the lawsuit, making it difficult to ascertain the motives, intentions, or any special interests of those underwriting the case. The D.C. lawyer appeared caught off...

hat’s this? …MORE winning? …Sheesh. Well, just add it to the pile in the corner over there, along with all the other winning we haven’t got around to yet. he internal legal counsel for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has just agreed with the White House Office of Legal Counsel that President Trump has full authority to appoint OMB Director Mick Mulvaney as the acting head of the agency. Oh noes, Princess Moonbat Feathers is gonna have a ‘splodey head in 3…. 2…. 1…

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official sued President Trump on Sunday over his appointment of Office and Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney to serve as interim director of the agency.Leandra English filed the lawsuit late Sunday to block Mulvaney from taking over the CFPB, and asked for a declaratory judgment by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on the matter. The federal official argues that the Dodd-Frank Act, a law championed by Democrats that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, prohibits the White House from naming the director for the agency.  English, who is the...

The messiness of the long-proverbial "mess in Washington" stands out this post-holiday week like a picked and evacuated turkey carcass. To itemize: 1) The tax debate, so-called. 2) The furor over who's to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- assuming you've heard of this enterprise, which is disliked by many on account of its claimed self-sufficiency and virtual non-accountability to the rest of the government. If we didn't know before that the federal government is too big for Republicans or Democrats, either one, to bring under control, my, oh, my, we should know it now. Let me rehearse the...

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, named by President Trump as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sent a memo to the agency's staff Monday that read: "Please disregard any instructions you receive from Ms. English in her presumed capacity as Acting Director," Reuters reports. He also brought donuts.The backdrop: The CFPB currently has two chiefs. Leandra English is former director Richard Cordray's pick to lead the agency, and she has sued the Trump administration over Mulvaney's appointment. Mulvaney told staffers to report any communications from English to the general counsel of the CFPB, who has said she...

President Trump is picking another fight with the Washington swamp by naming his own man as temporary boss of a federal agency conservatives hate. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has been a total disaster as run by the previous Administrations pick,” he tweeted Saturday. “Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public. We will bring it back to life!” the tweet said. Leadership of the bureau — the brainchild of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — was put in play Friday by the resignation of director Richard Cordray. Before he left, Cordray named his...

A despotism in our midst no one can do anything about, evidently. Could Congress create a fourth branch of government? Maybe break off a piece of what the executive branch handles now — commerce, say, or agriculture, or maybe even defense — and create a new office supported by its own dedicated tax stream and the authority to levy penalties? The president could still appoint this officer — I think prince-bishop has a nice ring to it — but wouldn’t be able to remove His Excellency absent extraordinary factual circumstances. Maybe we could expect the prince-bishop to decree exile for...

Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee hope to markup legislation to reform Dodd-Frank in April. Democrats will have a month to agree upon a strategy to defend the CFPB and to decide to what to degree they wish to work with Republicans to keep the CFPB alive. Democrats believe they can strike a deal with Republicans to transform the CFPB into a bipartisan commission from a single directorship. Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) explained that the alternative would give President Trump sole control over the CFPB when current director Richard Cordray’s term expires next year.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remains "the most out-of-control, unaccountable, and nontransparent agency in the federal government... And we can say that without reservation because this is one of the only agencies that literally operates outside of congressional oversight," added Wise, whose Virgina-based organization "works to protect consumers' right to access free-market goods and services." The CFPB, created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is funded largely by fees banks pay to the Federal Reserve. While its director, Richard Cordray, has bragged that his bureau has levied more than $141 million in fines used for CFPB education programs or reparation to...

Oversight: Congress and some others in the media finally see the urgency in reining in Obama's rogue, out-of-control, unaccountable and secretive Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is something we have urged since its inception. In 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act gave birth to what we have argued is the single most powerful and least accountable agency in Washington. CFPB has the power to police virtually every financial transaction in the economy. Yet it holds its meetings in secret, has no inspector general and is funded outside the normal congressional budget process. On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee will take up...

The liberal dictatorship of Richard Cordray at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) came under fire this week when the head of the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) called for the agency to open up its four advisory council meetings to the public and press. “Instead of operating behind closed doors, it’s time for the CFPB to live up to its oft-stated commitment to transparency and openness ... Wielding the power of the Dodd-Frank law, the CFPB has become an instrument for liberal tyranny focused against banks, mortgage companies, realtors, and other consumer credit professionals. The agency has been holding...

Senate leaders slowly stepped away from a major showdown over presidential nominees on Tuesday, as Republicans dropped their opposition to a key appointee and Democrats offered a significant concession in return -- the withdrawal of two controversial labor board picks. By Tuesday afternoon, lawmakers were describing the arrangement as a tentative "deal" that could avert an ugly stand-off. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid earlier had demanded that Republicans advance and approve at least seven nominees or face a controversial rule change that could drain their power. But Reid confirmed late Tuesday that things were cooling down. "We have a new...

In 2005, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to end the filibuster for judicial appointments by forcing a mid-session rule change on a majority vote, an act that would have ended two centuries of precedent. Before he could act, though, the Gang of 14 arose, led by Republican John McCain, to preserve the senatorial tradition, brokering a deal that left conservatives fuming by depriving Frist of his partisan majority. Eight years later, with Harry Reid threatening to take the same action on executive-branch appointments, where is that Old Gang of Ours? According to NBC, at least McCain might be riding...

President Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Obama did not have the power to make three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board. The unanimous decision is an embarrassing setback for the president, who made the appointments after Senate Republicans spent months blocking his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions. The ruling also throws into question Obama's recess...

America’s accumulated college-loan debt will surpass $1 trillion this year; what is our leadership doing about it? The Obama Administration took over the student loan market and expanded Pell Grants, but hasn’t accomplished anything to address the root cause of the crisis: exploding college fees and related costs. The only thing they’ve done is criticize innovators and entrepreneurs. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), issued a new report calling into question the costs and performance of For-Profit universities. There are actually hundreds of these schools, perhaps the most well-known being...

The companies that determine Americans' credit scores are about to come under government oversight for the first time. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday that it will start supervising the 30 largest firms that make up 94 percent of the industry. That includes the three big credit reporting firms: Equifax Inc., Experian and TransUnion. In remarks prepared for a speech Monday, Richard Cordray, the government agency's director, said that scorekeeping by credit bureaus plays such a large role in Americans' financial lives, it requires scrutiny.