Free Republic

Last month, Richard Cordray stepped down from his post as the first Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB now has the opportunity to move in a new direction — one that respects constitutional limits, promotes a healthy and well-functioning financial system, and thereby benefits consumers. The CFPB was established on two false premises: first that there were no consumer financial protections in place prior to the Dodd-Frank Act; second, that the CFPB was necessary to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Both assumptions deserve more careful examination. The reality is that federal consumer protection...

FULL TITLE: After Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Freezes Data Collecting, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Demands Reversal A federal court last week again ruled in favor of Mick Mulvaney as the rightful head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which strengthens his hand on such issues as the recent decision to freeze data collection in light of cybersecurity concerns. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who conceived the idea of the consumer agency, which critics say has too much and often undefined power, strongly objected to the agency’s temporary halt in data collection just last week. “CFPB cannot fulfill its core functions without...

A U.S. federal judge denied on Wednesday a preliminary injunction sought by the deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeking to stop White House budget director Mick Mulvaney from taking control of the agency. The deputy director, Leandra English, has challenged Mulvaney’s right to lead the consumer watchdog bureau, citing her endorsement by former CFPB Director Richard Cordray, an appointee of the Obama administration who stepped down in November. “English has not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits or shown that she will suffer irreparable injury absent injunctive relief,” Judge Timothy Kelly, of U.S. District Court...

A federal judge ruled late Wednesday in favor of President Donald Trump and the White House over the control of the national financial watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In a 46-page opinion, Judge Timothy Kelly denied Leandra English, the deputy director of the CFPB, a preliminary injection that would have stopped Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, from taking on a second role as acting director of the agency. The conflict arose late last month when Richard Cordray, named by President Barack Obama to lead the CFPB, stepped down and named English as his replacement. In response, the White...

Renovation costs for the brand new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters have skyrocketed, posting 25 percent in cost overruns. Original cost estimates for the CFPB’s renovation were estimated at $55 million, but the bureau ran up the proposed cost to $216 million. The Federal Reserve Inspector General rejected the proposal in 2014, saying there was no “sound basis” for the figure. As the CFPB renovation costs continued to escalate, renovation was taken out of the CFPB’s hands and transferred to the General Services Administration (GSA). GSA’s budget, however, was nearly twice the original $55 million, hitting $99 million.

It should come as no surprise the federal bureaucrats who are shielded from any accountability ran up costs for remodeling the office space for their new headquarters from a first estimate of $55 million to an eventual $124 million.  They actually wanted to spend a total of $216, until the adults stepped in.  Elizabeth Warren deliberately designed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to be insulated from congressional oversight by making it dependent on funding from the Federal Reserve System, which, you may remember, prints up (physically and digitally) our money and isn’t dependent on congressional appropriations. If someone...

Newt Gingrich said Thursday that Democrats are headed for a major political upset in 2018, mostly due to the mainstream media’s dishonesty and the party’s inability to learn from its own mistakes. “The great political surprise of 2018 will be the size of the Republican victory,” the former Republican House Speaker wrote in a column for Fox News. “After members of the elite media have spent two years savaging President Trump, lying about Republican legislation, and reassuring themselves that Republican defeat was inevitable, the size of the GOP victory in 2018 will be an enormous shock.” Mr. Gingrich said the...

<p>The economy is booming, with the New York branch of the Federal Reserve now estimating it will grow at the pace of 3.98% in the fourth quarter. That would represent our third straight quarter above 3% economic growth, a feat not achieved in over a decade.</p>

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write and admit: Trump is winning. In the brief space of a week, he won a brief court fight to shove Mick Mulvaney to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney wasted no time in unhinging a spate of consumer protection rulings, regulations, and personnel hires made during the Obama years. His SCOTUS pick, Neil Gorsuch, eagerly cast a vote to impose the Muslim travel ban. His EPA head, Scott Pruitt, delivered a couple million acres of public monument land in the West to oil, gas, and coal industry...

Agents of the federal government have been sending coded messages to one another, but they aren’t deep-cover spies evading the Russian spooks or transmitting North Korean launch codes. They are run-of-the-mill bureaucrats who appear to be using digital technology to evade the American people and their representatives in Congress and the White House. “There’s no elected control if the bureaucrats can have conversations that are not reviewable by elected officials,” said John Vecchione, president and CEO of the Cause of Action Institute (COA). “They can’t control the bureaucracy.” Vecchione’s group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request earlier this...

Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill ... The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was inserted in the bill, which passed on a partisan vote. All the Democrats voted for it. ... The power invested in the director of the CFPB was, and still is, unencumbered by any limiting authority of those elected to govern. He is a person who under Dodd-Frank answers to no-one. His agency receives its funding without any limitation or congressional oversight, as it has a “put” to the unlimited resources of the Federal Reserve rather than the congressionally-appropriated budget. The director of the bureau is essentially an unelected,...

What is going on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? It’s a clown show, or it’s rapidly becoming one. Richard Cordray, the former director of the agency, resigned at the end of November. There’s speculation that he’s mulling a gubernatorial bid in Ohio. Alas, comes the showdown. President Trump tapped Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney to run the agency, whereas Cordray had selected Leandra English, his deputy, to take the reins. The fact is the president has the power to appoint a new director, but as Guy noted, liberals saw the CFPB, the temple of of Liz...

Was the real reason behind Senator Elizabeth Warren’s outrage over Mick Mulvaney’s appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) about her own political survival? The New York Post’s Paul Sperry reports that the CFPB is engaged in a wide-variety of corruption. Everything from amassing secret ledgers to using penalties to ‘launder,’ funds into left-wing causes. Of course, because the CFPB operates independently of the U.S. Government, a full audit of the agency’s balance sheet have never been done. This sad reality may very well change under Mulvaney’s leadership.

A vandal targeted the home and vehicle of a Donald Trump supporter with spray paint and a blunt object twice this past weekend in Somerville, Massachusetts.The man sported a “Make America Great Again” sign in a window at his home and a bumpersticker supporting the president, along with a National Rifle Association decal, on a rear window of his truck. The vandal smashed the front windshield of the Chevrolet truck and spraypainted “BLM,” an acronym for Black Lives Matter, on the hood. Paint on one side of the vehicle petitioned its owner to “F— My A– Trump F—er.” The front...

This CFPB was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and was largely designed by radical Senator Elizabeth Warren when she was an Obama advisor. Since the beginning, it has been used as a political weapon by the far Left as a way to intimidate businesses that the Left opposes ideologically. The CFPB consistently oversteps its bounds. It is prohibited from regulating car deals, yet it does so anyway. It is prohibited from collecting personal data from consumers, yet it does so at a scale that rivals the NSA’s most controversial data gathering operations. Further, the CFPB draws its funding from...

FULL TITLE - We Got a Vast, Unaccountable, Unconstitutional Agency Because Elizabeth Warren Compared Mortgages to Toasters. And we're the stupid ones Sixteen hundred bureaucrats with the power to charge billions in fines, with a $600 million budget outside of the congressional appropriations process, and all because Elizabeth Warren compared mortgages to toasters. "Of all the ideas that get published in … journals like that, not so many make it into law," Warren boasted in 2011, at the launch of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She was referring to her essay "Unsafe At Any Rate," published by the "lefty" Democracy...

Sen. Ron Johnson says woman who claims to be acting chief ‘burrowed’ into agencyA top Republican demanded answers Wednesday on how Leandra English, the woman Democrats are pushing to be acting director of the government’s top consumer advocacy agency, managed to “burrow” into her job and outlast the Obama administration. Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Ms. English held a political job at the Office of Personnel Management but managed to convert herself to a career civil service position early this year at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The process is called “burrowing,”...

ARTICLE DATE 11/24/16...............The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the most partisan agency in the federal government in terms of donations to candidates, according to campaign finance data. Employees at the CFPB, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, contributed nearly $50,000 during the 2016 campaign with all of that money going to aid Hillary Clinton or her rival, the insurgent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., VT). Agency employees made more than 300 donations during the campaign. Not one went to a Republican candidate. Rep. Sean Duffy (R., Wis.), a frequent critic of the agency,...

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney just savaged the federal agency President Donald Trump recently put him in charge of during his first press conference as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney, who has long criticized the CFPB, doubled down on his hatred of the agency which was enacted in 2011 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations passed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn. “Yeah, my opinion of the structure of CFPB has not changed,” Mulvaney said. “I still think it is an awful example of a bureaucracy that has gone wrong. It...

The fight for control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may have significant effects on the bureau's mass acquisition of private financial records, according to privacy advocates. The CFPB pools vast quantities of data for research purposes, including millions of people’s credit card records, which it says are anonymized, commercially available and tracked to help consumers, not to spy on them. Critics doubt the adequacy of safeguards, however, and liken the credit data-collection to the National Security Agency’s monitoring of internet and phone records under laws that allow tracking of spies and terrorists.