I’m not quite sure why, but I enjoyed acting director Mick Mulvaney’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday more than I enjoyed the appearance before the House Financial Services Committee a day earlier. To me, it appeared as though the Senators were less concerned with scoring political points, less concerned with creating soundbites, and more knowledgeable about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection as it is supposed to be called) than their brethren in the House of Representatives.
The most interesting little nugget of news that came out of yesterday’s hearing was when Mulvaney said he is under no statutory requirement to make the agency’s consumer complaint database something that the public has a right to access.
“The public-facing portion of complaint database is not statutorily mandated,” Mulvaney said, responding to questions from Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto [D-Nev.]. When asked if he could make the database private, Mulvaney responded, “I am completely within my discretion of the statute to do that.”
If there was a theme to Mulvaney’s two days on Capitol Hill, it was that he is only going to do what the law says he has to do and nothing more. Once again, he pleaded with Congress to put the CFPB under the Congressional appropriations process, and said he would do no more than what the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act requires him to do.
FINALLY MENTIONS DEBT COLLECTION
It wasn’t much, but Mulvaney did at least mention something tangentially related to the ARM industry during yesterday’s hearing. When asked what the CFPB does that the other financial services or consumer protection regulators, such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t do, Mulvaney responded that the CFPB is charged with an extra ‘A’ in enforcing UDAAP violations (Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices — most agencies do not have Abusive in their description of UDAP), and with promulgating rules under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Following up, Sen. David Perdue [R-Ga.], asked Mulvaney if the Bureau is needed to protect consumers, and Mulvaney responded, “you could protect consumers without me being here.”
STILL HASN’T MET THE ENEMY
Mulvaney also disclosed that he has yet to meet Leandra English, who was promoted from chief of staff to deputy director by former director Richard Cordray in the hours before he resigned last November with the intention of having her run the CFPB until a permanent director was named. English subsequently filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and Mulvaney after the president appointed Mulvaney to run the agency on an interim basis. English, who is still on the CFPB payroll, has not made her presence known at the CFPB office, if she has even been there since Mulvaney started showing up.
When asked about what English was doing since she was still employed by the CFPB, Mulvaney said he has yet to meet her.
SHOWDOWN
Everyone was bracing for the showdown between Mulvaney and Sen. Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.], one of the primary architects of the CFPB when it was founded nearly a decade ago. During her five minutes, Sen. Warren set the table by establishing the efforts Mulvaney undertook while he was a member of the House of Representatives to abolish or diminish the power of the CFPB, before asking him how consumers who had been harmed by certain egregious behavior would have been protected if Mulvaney had gotten his wish and the CFPB was disbanded.
To each of the examples provided by Sen. Warren, Mulvaney responded that another federal regulator could have stepped in and engaged.
EVERYONE WANTS TO WORK AT THE CFPB
“I can’t tell you how many people are begging me for jobs because of how much we pay,” Mulvaney said during his testimony, when asked about the pay scale at the CFPB.
