Mick Mulvaney doesn’t want his own job to exist, and has readily said so. On Wednesday, Mulvaney, who serves as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s acting director, fired his 25-member advisory board en masse, honoring his commitment to dismantling the bureau from the inside.
From the Washington Post:
The panel has traditionally played an influential role in advising the CFPB’s leadership on new regulations and policies. But some members, who include prominent consumer advocates, academics and industry executives, began to complain that Mulvaney was ignoring them and making unwise decisions about the agency’s future.
On Monday, 11 CAB members held a news conference and criticized Mulvaney for, among other things, canceling legally required meetings with the group.
On Wednesday, group members were notified that they were being replaced — and that they could not reapply for spots on the new board.
The mission of the CFPB—which was first envisioned by Senator Elizabeth Warren as a Harvard professor—is to protect consumers from predatory banking and lending practices.
As the bureau’s acting director, Mulvaney has made it clear that he does not believe it’s important for the federal government to police banks and credit card companies to make sure they don’t take advantage of customers.
At the beginning of the year, Mulvaney requested $0 in funding for the CFPB, the agency he oversees as acting director. In an internal memo, he told staffers the agency will “fulfill its statutory responsibilities but go no further.”
Mulvaney has also “pulled back” the bureau’s investigation into the massive Equifax data breach, and quietly dropped an investigation into a payday lender who donated to Mulvaney’s Congressional campaigns.
Now, the bureau will have even less authority to call out Mulvaney and try to further its mission of protecting Americans from predatory financial institutions. By firing the advisory board, Mulvaney is signaling that he’s more than happy to take out anyone who may provide a check on him or his bank-lobbyist friends.
Remember, this is a man who has openly admitted to his own corruption in the past. “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney told a conference for bankers and lending industry officials in April. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
Just another reminder that our top federal bureaucrats are blatantly corrupt, and so far, no one has done anything about it!!!