Recognizing that free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it, allow me to offer Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent some insight on his new gig as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The bureau, originally the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was built on the misguided principle that protecting consumers in the financial services arena should be “above politics.”
In Washington-speak, that means an entity that’s not accountable to elected politicians — or, by extension, to the people who elected them.
That was bad enough. But under the leadership of Barack Obama appointee Richard Cordray, the bureau decided that being “above politics” also meant that it could be “above the law.”
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.
But you get the point.
By the time President Trump came to office the first time, the CFPB had become something closer to a progressive vigilante shakedown shop than a government regulator.
When he asked me to fill the role of the bureau’s acting director in 2018, the president’s instructions to me were crystal clear: Rein the place in.
And that’s exactly what we did. More precisely: We simply started following the law, halting the CFPB’s leftist overreach.
The left howled bloody murder, Deep State actors within the bureau set out to undermine our efforts, the media launched character assassination campaigns against my staff, and Warren threatened to have me investigated.
But industry leaders thanked us for bringing sanity to the system. And, miracle of miracles, consumers were still protected.
I hope the president’s instructions now to Acting Director Bessent are just as clear, but even more sweeping: Shut the place down.
We toyed with doing just that when I was running the CFPB, including the possibility of simply locking the doors at headquarters. We figured that paying people to do nothing was better than paying them to break the law.
But we weren’t entirely sure we had the authority to do it, and when I raised the question with the lawyers at the White House, they reminded me we were “up to our eyeballs in the Mueller investigation” and there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to examine shutting down the CFPB, too.
Today there is no Mueller investigation, and I get the very real impression the Trump team is much more interested in disruptive change within the federal government than it was six or seven years ago.
If we are going to see dramatic change in the CFPB, it will have to come from within the leadership of the bureau itself — and from the White House.
Congress could, in theory, simply ax the bureau from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the 2010 law that created it in the wake of the 2008 recession.
But that would take 60 votes in the Senate, which is highly unlikely.
Senate Republicans could place its dissolution in a reconciliation bill to obviate the 60-vote threshold, but the chances of that passing parliamentary muster are iffy, at best.
Until 60 senators see the light on the abomination that the bureau has become, Congress could take steps to starve the CFPB beast.
Currently the bureau’s funding, unlike any other federal agency, comes directly from the Federal Reserve — not from appropriations passed by Congress.
If legislators reduced the allowance the CFPB gets from the Fed, or funded the bureau through the regular appropriations process instead, that would move the needle in the right direction.
The problem with that, of course, is needles can always be moved back again next time Democrats run the bureau.
So it’s time to break the needle off, once and for all.
Things are different in 2025 than they were in 2018 — both in Washington, and in the country at large.
Trump won this election decisively, and the voters who elected him are clamoring for a Washington that simply makes more sense.
Trump and Bessent have a chance to do something no White House has done in nearly a century: Shut down a government agency.
My advice: Don’t miss the opportunity.
Mick Mulvaney was White House chief of staff and acting director of the CFPB in President Trump’s first term.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
