President Trump is likely to select Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney as the interim director of the CFPB—an agency Mulvaney once called a joke.
Mulvaney would temporarily replace Richard Cordray, who announced he was leaving the agency by the end of the month.
If Trump selects Mulvaney, the OMB chief is likely to select a subordinate to run the agency until Trump selects a permanent nominee and that person is confirmed by the Senate.
An interim director would not require Senate confirmation.
The move could come as early as Friday, according to press reports.
The Trump Administration and Mulvaney have been outspoken critics of the CFPB.
“It a wonderful example of how a bureaucracy will function if it has no accountability to anybody,” he told the CU Times in 2014, after speaking at NAFCU’s Congressional Caucus. “It turns out being a joke and that’s what the CFPB really has been in sick, sad, kind of way,”
Mulvaney also has clashed with the NCUA in the past.
As a House member from South Carolina, Mulvaney also criticized the NCUA for agency spending, as well as for spending $1 billion in legal fees in cases involving the failed corporate credit unions.
Various names have surfaced as possible nominees to replace Cordray, including Acting Comptroller of the Currency Keith Noreika, former Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) and, Todd Zywicki of the George Mason University School of Law.
Most recently, Noreika and Cordray bitterly clashed over the methodology the CFPB used to develop its arbitration rule. Congress eventually nullified the rule.
Any Trump choice is likely to try to decrease the CFPB’s powers. Senate Democrats already have signaled that such a nominee would cause a bitter confirmation battle in the Senate.
