Thomas Phippen reports for the Daily Caller on efforts to scale back the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
President Donald Trump’s administration is urging Congress to reshape the Sen. Elizabeth Warren-crafted consumer finance agency before it can be used as a tool for “tyranny.”
“The [Consumer Financial Protection] Bureau is far too powerful, with precious little oversight of its activities,” CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney said in a statement Monday. “The power wielded by the Director of the Bureau could all too easily be used to harm consumers, destroy businesses, or arbitrarily remake American financial markets.”
Mulvaney released a semi-annual report to Congress Monday, detailing the CFPB’s work between April and September 2017, when Obama appointee and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray led the bureau.
“The structure and powers of this agency are not something the Founders and Framers would recognize,”Mulvaney argued in his letter accompanying the report. The CFPB appears tyrannical in that it appears to accumulate “legislative, executive, and judiciary, [powers] in the same hands,” Mulvaney suggested, quoting from James Madison’s “Federalist Number 47.” Such an accumulation of power “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” Madison wrote.
