Under his leadership, the bureau has slow-walked or derailed investigations and rules aimed at the practices of prepaid card issuers and payday lenders.
Questions are now being raised about Mulvaney’s relationships with some of the companies that the CFPB seems to be sparing. Earlier this week, he quietly dropped a four-year investigation of World Acceptance Corp., a payday lender in his home state of South Carolina that donated at least $4,500 to his congressional campaigns.
Mulvaney received nearly $60,000 from the payday lending industry over the course of his political career, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, including $31,700 in the 2015-2016 election cycle. Consumer advocates have expressed concern that he is going easy on payday lenders, which provide short-term loans at high interest rates to mostly low-income people.
With Mulvaney’s blessing, Congress killed the CFPB’s controversial rule banning mandatory arbitration clauses. For the first time, the rule would have allowed consumers to use class action lawsuits against credit reporting agencies in the wake of the Equifax data breach that put 143 million U.S. consumers at risk, possibly for the rest of their lives.
In his latest e-mail, Mulvaney said the CFPB’s constituents include: “those who use credit cards, and those who provide those cards; those who take loans, and those who make them; those who buy cars, and those who sell them. All of those people are part of what makes this country great.”
While consumer advocates have feared that Mulvaney would shutter the CFPB, the director refuted that. “When I arrived at the CFPB, I told folks that despite what they might have heard, I had no intention of shutting down the bureau,” Mulvaney writes. “Indeed, the law doesn’t allow that.”
However, Mulvaney’s goal for a smaller CFPB became apparent in January when he told the Federal Reserve the CFPB didn’t need any money for the second quarter of 2018, but would instead use its $177 million reserve fund, accrued during Cordray’s tenure, to cover operating costs. “The request—or lack thereof—will serve to reduce the federal deficit by the amount that the bureau might have requested under different leadership,” Mulvaney wrote to the Federal Reserve at the time.