Sen. Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.], a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and former CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney, announced earlier this week that she will seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
Sen. Warren was the individual who originally proposed the idea for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, when she was a Harvard professor. She was appointed by former president Barack Obama to help set up the agency and ran it until former director Richard Cordray was installed. There were concerns that Warren would not receive enough support from Republicans to garner the necessary votes to be confirmed by the Senate.
After the CFPB was created, Warren, 69, announced she was running for Senate and in 2012 became the first female Senator from Massachusetts.
Other prominent Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders [D-Vermont] and former vice president Joe Biden are also reported to be considering runs for president in 2020. The Democratic field is said to be wide open heading into the 2020 primary season, which will kick off in a year. Sen. Warren is hoping to get a jump start on those potential opponents by announcing well in advance of everyone else.
Sen. Warren has also been a vocal critic of many institutions within the financial services arena and has used her spot on the Senate Banking Committee to rail against perceived injustices — especially those against low-income individuals and the middle class.
“The problem we’ve got right now in Washington is that it works great for those who’ve got money to buy influence, and I’m fighting against that,” Sen. Warren said on Monday in announcing her candidacy. “And you bet it’s going to make a lot of people unhappy. But at the end of the day, I don’t go to Washington to work for them.”
Sen. Warren opposed the nomination of Kathy Kraninger to be the director of the CFPB, arguing that she did not have enough consumer protection experience to run the agency. She also questioned the appointment of Mulvaney to be the acting director when Cordray resigned in November 2017. She also co-sponsored legislation that would end the program placing unpaid income tax debts with private collection agencies and called Betsy DeVos “the worst Secretary of Education the country has ever seen” in a report criticizing
