The CFPB is a disaster. Invented in the wake of the financial crisis to protect consumers from profit hungry banksters, the agency instead created a laundry list of onerous regulations that only the biggest, most corrupt banks were well financed enough to meet, leading to further consolidation making banks that were too big too fail significantly more important and structurally problematic.
The political left would have you believe these people are all money hungry corrupt right wingers. As Bill McMorris reports, they’d be wrong:
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, said that it is no surprise that the agency would contribute to the Democratic campaign. Republicans have tried to reduce the scope of the bureau’s broad regulatory power since Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), one of the most liberal lawmakers in the country, oversaw its creation.
“CFPB employees fell over each other to give money to Hillary because she supported CFPB’s desire to remain in the shadows and unaccountable to the American people,” Duffy said. “No one is shocked that Washington bureaucrats would donate to the candidate who promised to maintain and expand onerous Dodd-Frank regulations that crush our community banks and local credit unions.
Does this sound problematic to anyone? An entire government agency donating all its political resources to a political party is problematic, because it creates unethical ties between that agency- its budget, its priorities, and everything else- and that political party. It raises questions about the purpose of any particular actions that agency might take.
So what to do? Should President Trump abolish the CFPB? What do you think?
