Donald Trump's new acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants U.S. taxpayers to be very very afraid of the power he now wields. TPM writes:
“The structure of the CFPB is fundamentally flawed. The authority I have now as the acting director really should frighten people. You can sit down in a room with three or four people, and say, well, let’s go off and do this, and there is no accountability to Congress,” he said on Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” Thursday.
“I could set the budget pretty much without any input from Congress, in fact, without any input from Congress,” he said. “On one hand people call it independent but the bottom line is it’s simply unaccountable.”
The budget chief said he is “hopeful” he can restructure the agency to make it more accountable to taxpayers and said he wants to “limit as much as we can what the CFPB does to sort of interfere with capitalism and the financial services market.”
Actually, Mulvaney doesn't seem particularly interested in making the agency more accountable to taxpayers. In fact, after there was a legal scuffle over whether Mulvaney or an Obama holdover would take over at the agency and a judge ruled in Mulvaney's favor, he explained that Trump "has the right to have [his] agenda put forward and that’s exactly what we're doing."
Anyone who thinks Trump's agenda has anything to do with the needs of the vast majority of Americans hasn't been paying attention. If you're not a high-dollar GOP donor or a one percenter, you and your finances may as well drop dead.