Looks like another controversy has begun:
...Trump on Friday named White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, setting up a legal clash over who is in charge of the controversial agency.
The announcement came just hours after outgoing CFPB Director Richard Cordray appointed the agency’s chief of staff, Leandra English, as deputy director, establishing her as his successor as he steps down today.
Mulvaney:
Mulvaney himself, while in Congress, savagely attacked the bureau, calling it in 2014 “a wonderful example of how a bureaucracy will function if it has no accountability to anybody.” He added that the CFPB has been a "sick, sad" joke
Here is a couple of excerpts reported:
..the White House said in a statement Friday night.
“Director Mulvaney will serve as Acting Director until a permanent director is nominated and confirmed,” the statement said.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, explicitly says the consumer bureau's deputy director shall “serve as acting Director in the absence or unavailability of the Director,” giving the edge to English.
The clash it seems to me, is that Mulvaney has already been confirmed by the senate, but not for this job as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
Yet the Federal Vacancies Act allows the president to install a temporary acting head of any executive agency who has already been confirmed by the Senate to another position, like Mulvaney has as leader of the Office of Management and Budget.
Then this:
Still, the Vacancies Act says that an opening may also be filled if another law "expressly … designates an officer or employee to perform the functions and duties of a specified office temporarily in an acting capacity.”
It doesn't say whether one approach supersedes the other, something the courts will likely have to sort out.
So Mulvaney, who has disparaged the CFPB as a “sick sad joke”, and that “some of us would like to get rid of it.”..has been tasked by Trump to run it, while he also remains in position as director of OMB.