Mick Mulvaney intends to make all the drama surrounding his appointment as interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worth it.
One of Mulvaney’s first orders as interim director was to freeze hiring, rulemaking, and regulatory actions for 30 days. That’s fairly standard practice for leadership changes in federal agencies amid a party transition. But in the past few weeks, Mulvaney’s orders have started to extend beyond the ordinary due diligence.
In addition to plans for scrutinizing the agency’s budget, the temporary hiring freeze has become indefinite, though in December the acting director mentionedplans to bring on several political staffers in order to give “professional staff here ... a better feel for where the administration wants to take the bureau.” Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticized those hires as a move to politicize an independent agency. The changes that Mulvaney is instituting also include slowing down the implementation of new rules, a moratorium on collecting identifying information that could tie individuals to the financial data gathered by the agency, and tweaks to the agency’s mission statement add up to a reorientation that could fundamentally have a big impact on the bureau and the work it does. (The bureau didn’t respond to a request for comment.)