Financial regulators are rarely the subject of a media frenzy, but because the Trump administration has zeroed in on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this past week has been the exception. Some of the hysteria is over Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump tapped to cut waste from the federal bureaucracy. But much of the ire is aimed at Russ Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director and the acting CFPB director.
Vought directed all CFPB employees “not to issue any proposed or formal rules, stop pending investigations and not open new investigations, halt all stakeholder engagements, and abstain from issuing public communications.” Vought also announced that the CFPB would not take its “next draw of unappropriated funding” from the Federal Reserve. To top it off, the CFPB also fired its probationary workers “as part of the Trump administration’s government-wide layoffs.”
Predictably, a federal employees union quickly sued to stop the Trump administration from “dismantling” the CFPB. But in a move that would be strange for anyone who wanted to shut down an agency, Trump also nominated Jonathan McKernan to be the next CFPB director.
Full disclosure: I do not think Congress should have created the CFPB, something I’ll explain in a bit. But first, let’s review what happened during the first Trump administration.
Read more in Forbes.