Why Is This Happening?

An Exhaustive Review of the History and Nascent Culture of the CFPB

Here’s the question: 

Would the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) still be getting aggressively hollowed out by Trump Administration officials and Republicans in Congress if the agency had been run differently over the last 14 years?

It’s entirely possible that the answer to this question is yes.

As one source I spoke to for this story colorfully described it, “it’s just random chance that the CFPB was the one that ended up trapped in Russ Vought’s torture dungeon.”

This is a valid perspective. 

Vought’s war against the federal bureaucracy isn’t specific to financial services or consumer protection regulations. It’s wide-ranging and framed in the broadest and most existential terms possible. Here’s just one quote from the Project 2025 budget plan, which Vought helped write: 

The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.  

That’s obviously much bigger than Elizabeth Warren or Rohit Chopra. In an alternate universe, an alternate Russ Vought is probably working to functionally eliminate the US Department of Agriculture, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or some other equally useless patch of the bureaucratic swamp. 

That said, most of the folks I spoke with for this story didn’t feel like it was entirely random that the CFPB became the poster child for the Trump Administration’s war against government overreach. They felt that there was something specific to the CFPB (its mission, how it was founded, how it had been operated over the last 14 years, etc.) that made it an especially tempting target.

I tend to agree with this. And I think it’s an important idea to interrogate. 

Most federal financial services regulatory agencies are really old. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is 92. The Federal Reserve is 111. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) was founded during the Civil War! It’s 162 years old!

The reason this matters is that these agencies have been around long enough to establish institutional cultures that persist across different political climates. 

Now, to be clear, this isn’t always a good thing. These agencies can be a bit old-fashioned and stuck in their ways when it comes to adapting to innovation and new technologies. And, occasionally, the cultural problems at these agencies are much, much worse.

That said, I think the stability, predictability, and apolitical nature of most federal financial services regulatory agencies is (mostly) a feature, not a bug. 

As I have written about previously, financial services companies benefit from certainty. Executives at these companies want to know, within a reasonable margin of error, that the rules today will be the rules tomorrow … and next year … and five years from now. Even if the specifics change, they want to feel confident that regulators will show fidelity to the underlying principles (safety and soundness, fair competition, consumer protection) regardless of their politics.

So even though stories like this one from a few years ago seem silly:

More than three decades ago, the OCC says, it lent the portrait [of Hugh McCulloch, two-time Treasury Secretary and the nation’s first comptroller of the currency] to Treasury. Since then, despite the OCC’s pleas, Treasury won’t give it back. Treasury is in charge of federal borrowing, but for the OCC, this loan is long overdue.

Current acting Comptroller Michael Hsu and his staff want the painting returned, people familiar with their thinking said, although they haven’t said so publicly.

And they definitely are silly (federal regulators fighting over a portrait!); they are also a symptom of a more profound feature of well-designed government systems: institutional trust. 

Broadly speaking, people trust that the FDIC, Fed, and OCC will be around for a long time and that they will continue to do their various jobs (ensuring safety and soundness, most importantly) in a (mostly) fair and unbiased manner.  

Institutional trust is why serious and pragmatic policymakers, such as Miki Bowman, Jonathan Gould, Rodney Hood, and Travis Hill, have been appointed to leadership positions at these regulatory agencies. It’s why the Supreme Court took the unusual and legally questionable step of telling President Trump not to fuck with Jerome Powell. 

And, I believe, a lack of institutional trust (which is, broadly, an epidemic in our society today) is why Jonathan McKernan ultimately backed away from the chance to run the CFPB.

So, in today’s essay, I am going to examine the history of the CFPB and the attempts made over that time to establish an institutional culture that would outlast our current political epoch. 

This essay is based on interviews with more than two dozen former employees of the CFPB, whose tenures collectively cover the last 14 years, and whom I granted anonymity so they would feel comfortable sharing their insights and experiences with me. 

Defining the CFPB

Before we delve into the last 14 years, we should set the stage by reviewing the origins and statutory authority of the CFPB.

The CFPB was created by Title X of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010. It was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who was, at that time, a law professor at Harvard.

As the financial markets were melting down in 2007, Professor Warren was pitching her idea for a new federal agency focused on making consumer financial products safer:

Consumers can enter the market to buy physical products confident that they won’t be tricked into buying exploding toasters and other unreasonably dangerous products. They can concentrate their shopping efforts in other directions, helping to drive a competitive market that keeps costs low and encourages innovation in convenience, durability, and style. Consumers entering the market to buy financial products should enjoy the same protection. Just as the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) protects buyers of goods and supports a competitive market, we need the same for consumers of financial products–a new regulatory regime, and even a new regulatory body, to protect consumers who use credit cards, home mortgages, car loans, and a host of other products.

Notice how Warren couches her proposal in the language of capitalism. Safety standards (like those created by the CPSC) create a more efficient and competitive free market, such that the commission authoring and enforcing those standards essentially pays for itself:

The evidence clearly shows that CPSC is a cost-effective agency. Since it was established, product-related death and injury rates in the United States have decreased substantially. The CPSC estimates that just three safety standards for three products alone–cigarette lighters, cribs, and baby walkers–save more than $2 billion annually. The annual estimated savings is more than CPSC’s total cumulative budget since its inception.

Warren goes on to propose a “Financial Product Safety Commission” that would centrally regulate the safety of financial products (rather than financial institutions), thus reducing the incentives for regulatory arbitrage. This FPSC would act as a highly technocratic “translation layer” between the financial industry and consumers: 

An FPSC would promote the benefits of free markets by assuring that consumers can enter credit markets with confidence that the products they purchase meet minimum safety standards. No one expects every customer to become an engineer to buy a toaster that doesn’t burst into flames, or analyze complex diagrams to buy an infant car seat that doesn’t collapse on impact. By the same reasoning, no customer should be forced to read the fine print in 30-plus-page credit card contracts to determine whether the company claims it can seize property paid for with the credit card or raise the interest rate by more than 20 points if the customer gets into a dispute with the water company.

Instead, an FPSC would develop precisely such expertise in consumer financial products. A commission would be able to collect data about which financial products are least understood, what kinds of disclosures are most effective, and which products are most likely to result in consumer default. Free of legislative micromanaging, it could develop nuanced regulatory responses; some terms might be banned altogether, while others might be permitted only with clearer disclosure. A Commission might promote uniform disclosures that make it easier to compare products from one issuer to another, and to discern conflicts of interest on the part of a mortgage broker or seller of a currently loosely regulated financial product. 

This vision (along with a tremendous amount of lobbying from Warren and others) resulted in the creation of the CFPB, which was charged by Congress to “implement and, where applicable, enforce Federal consumer financial law consistently for the purpose of ensuring that all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services and that markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive.”

It consolidated consumer-protection authority from seven different regulatory agencies (the Fed, OCC, FDIC, OTS, NCUA, HUD & FTC) and 18 “enumerated consumer laws” (TILA, RESPA, ECOA, FCRA, etc.) into one agency. 

It established a rather unique organizational structure and funding mechanism; a single independent Director with a 5-year term and the ability to draw up to 12% of the Federal Reserve System’s 2009 operating budget (inflation-adjusted) each year.

And it defined the structure of the bureau and the scope of its authority. 

Banks, thrifts, and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets would be directly supervised, along with non‑banks in the mortgage, payday lending, private‑student‑loan, and other “larger‑participant” markets. 

The bureau itself was organized into the following divisions (along with separate offices for the general counsel and external affairs):

• Supervision, Enforcement & Fair Lending — Responsible for examinations, investigations, and litigation.
• Research, Markets & Regulations — Responsible for rulemaking, market studies, and data analytics.
• Consumer Education & Engagement — Responsible for financial education & vulnerable‑population (servicemembers, older Americans, students, etc.) outreach.
• Operations — Responsible for HR, tech, security, finance, and (until 2014) managing consumer complaints and responses.  

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner named Warren “Assistant to the President & Special Advisor to the Secretary” and tasked her with building the agency. She and her initial team (including Raj Date, Len Kennedy, and Peggy Twohig) drafted the first org chart, designed the consumer‑complaint portal, and interviewed more than 2,000 stakeholders. 

Warren was viewed as the logical choice to lead the agency as its first director, but fierce opposition from the banking industry and Senate Republicans scuttled that, and former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray, whom Warren had already hired as the CFPB’s enforcement chief, was appointed instead. 

The Cordray Era

The best summary I have heard of the Rich Cordray era of the CFPB, particularly the first two years, was messy and messianic.

Let’s start with messy.

The bureau was brand new. It had to be staffed up rapidly, which was accomplished through a combination of bringing in outside folks from industry, consumer advocacy groups, and state regulatory agencies, as well as a lot of transfers of federal regulators from other agencies (the Fed, OCC, and FTC, particularly). In those days, the CFPB didn’t have a single headquarters. Staff were dispersed across a number of old office buildings, all of which were in dire need of refurbishment (cockroaches were a common sight, according to multiple sources).

To put it into fintech terms, the CFPB in these days was an early-stage startup. There were no processes in place. Everything needed to be figured out on the fly. Early hires were given a great deal of responsibility and autonomy, which they eagerly embraced out of a sincere desire to help consumers.

Which brings us to messianic.

The early CFPB was intensely mission-driven. Recruiting was, in the words of an early leader at the bureau, “like pushing on an open door.” In the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown and millions of Americans losing their homes, people were deeply passionate about the idea of joining an agency expressly designed to protect consumers. A well-known mantra inside the bureau in those days was, “No one should lose their home, their savings, or their dream because they got trapped by a fine print trick.”

When asked to describe the culture of the CFPB in those days, an early staffer I spoke with described three main pillars:

1. Anti-capture. The first wave of CFPB staff in 2010–2011 moved into the former Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) headquarters at 1700 G Street NW. OTS was created in 1989 to supervise thrifts following the savings and loan crisis, but it quickly gained a reputation for being excessively industry-friendly in its pursuit of assessment fees from the institutions it supervised. It would constantly brag about its focus on deregulation and regulatory flexibility (there’s a famous picture of former Director of OTS James Gilleran holding a chainsaw at an event focused on deregulation). The OTS was eliminated by Dodd-Frank after its deregulatory zeal specifically contributed to the failures of high-profile institutions, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. Working inside the corpse of a regulatory agency that had failed due to industry capture gave early CFPB employees a visceral reminder of the importance of staying aligned with consumers’ interests and not becoming too cozy with industry.   
2. Pro-competition. The bureau was explicitly created to encourage fair competition. The core idea (as expressed in the Warren article quoted above) is that free markets produce the best outcomes for consumers, but only when those markets are fair and transparent. One of the primary purposes of the CFPB was to level the playing field and increase choice for consumers. This impulse, in some ways, tempered the bureau’s anti-industry capture philosophy, which, if left unchecked, could easily evolve into a broader opposition to capitalism.  
3. Wide-angle lens. Unique among federal financial services regulators, the CFPB has no chartering authority. As such, its purview isn’t limited to a particular segment of the banking industry. In fact, one of the primary motivations behind the creation of the CFPB (as expressed in Warren’s article) was to have a “cop on the beat” who could also monitor non-bank financial services providers and other innovative, less-regulated corners of the industry. This mandate created a culture of curiosity inside the bureau, with staffers (particularly those in the Research, Markets, & Regulations division) constantly trying to understand where the industry was headed.  

This culture was designed to optimize for two different, and at times, contradictory outcomes:

1. Put wins on the board. There was a strong desire and an urgency during the early days of the CFPB to demonstrate the value that the agency could deliver to consumers. Part of this urgency was statutory (Dodd-Frank mandated the creation of certain regulatory rules within specific timeframes, mostly in the mortgage space) and part of it was a desire on the part of leadership to show that an agency focused exclusively on consumer protection could generate a tangible ROI (complaints handled, dollars of restitution distributed, etc.) 
2. Build a great institution. Balancing out the desire to rack up quick wins was a recognition that the bureau needed to wield its broad authority judiciously. Early leaders at the bureau took the Federal Trade Commission as a cautionary tale in this respect. Prior to the 1980s, the FTC had a broad mandate and very few checks on its authority. However, after attempting to impose an expansive ban on television advertising targeting children, the FTC created a massive backlash for itself, which resulted in the agency’s authority being severely curtailed by Congress. Recognizing the possibility that their expansive powers and political independence could be similarly curtailed if they overreached, Cordray and his staff sought to maintain a “paradoxical conservatism” that kept bureau employees’ passion and enthusiasm balanced against the cautious use of the bureau’s authority. 

Beyond these structural considerations and organizational incentives, much of the early CFPB’s culture was a reflection of Rich Cordray himself.

In my discussions with those who worked with him, Cordray was consistently described as smart (he was a five-time Jeopardy champion in 1987) and prepared (he always read the prep memos before the meeting, including the footnotes). 

He created a highly inclusive environment, with weekly policy committee meetings, featuring stakeholders across all divisions, and recurring “pitch Rich” days, where staffers were encouraged to pitch him their crazy ideas.

This environment was appreciated and resented, in roughly equal measure. Staff felt like they had a seat at the table and the ability to influence policy (which is hugely appealing within bureaucratic environments, especially to staffers who are newer in their careers). However, the consensus-driven environment was also a source of frustration, especially among folks in the Research, Markets & Regulations division who felt that their subject matter expertise should be given more deference in the decision-making process.

The large group meetings were also a venue for an important ongoing debate within the bureau at the time: Which tool should we use?

As anyone who has worked for a bank or fintech company over the last 14 years can attest, the CFPB has numerous ways to advance its primary policy goal of protecting consumers. It can write rules, bring enforcement actions, and prioritize various topics within its supervision, research, market outreach, consumer education, and external affairs initiatives.

Put simply, the bureau has a lot of different clubs in its bag. And because Dodd-Frank authorized the CFPB to stop unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAP) in connection with any consumer-finance product or service, it was able to go further than other regulators and consumer protection regulations had gone before (no other federal statute had ever banned “abusive” conduct and Congress gave the CFPB the sole authority to flesh out what that term means in the context of its responsibilities).

For the most part, the Cordray-era CFPB attempted to be thoughtful in selecting the appropriate tool for each job. And when it selected the hammer (i.e., enforcement actions), it generally tried not to swing it in an overly reckless or aggressive way.

However, it wasn’t always successful.

When I asked folks for examples of cases where the CFPB overstepped, the same one from this era consistently came up: PHH Corp. v. CFPB. 

In 2014, the CFPB brought a case against PHH, alleging that the company had steered borrowers to mortgage insurers that then bought “captive” reinsurance from a PHH affiliate, in violation of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA).

The controversy was over how the CFPB chose to interpret RESPA in this case, which included claiming that every premium paid into a captive deal is an illegal kickback regardless of market value (discarding established regulatory guidance that had allowed such deals if priced fairly), applying that reading retroactively back to 2008, declaring no statute-of-limitations in CFPB administrative actions, and significantly increasing the penalty assessed to PHH.

The aggressive interpretation was rejected by the federal appellate court for D.C., with Judge Brett Kavanaugh calling the CFPB’s approach “an abuse of discretion” and finding that the CFPB’s single-director structure was unconstitutional. 

Much of the appellate court’s ruling was later overturned, but the case created a beachhead for future legal challenges to the bureau’s structure and funding, and dragged the case out long enough to see it dismissed by the Trump 1.0 CFPB. It also provided fodder to critics of the CFPB, inside the banking lobby and on the Republican side of the aisle on Capitol Hill, who saw the bureau as inherently hostile to the financial industry (a position that was more palatable to take the further removed we got from 2007/2008).

Director Cordray resigned in November of 2017, almost exactly a year after the election of Donald Trump.  

The Kraninger Era

No one I spoke with for this essay had much to say about Mick Mulvaney.

His tenure as Acting Director of the CFPB was dramatic, but brief (November 2017 to December 2018). There was the fight with Leandra English (Cordray’s Chief of Staff) for interim control. There was his first day, which included bringing in donuts for the staff and imposing a 30-day freeze on hiring, as well as new regulations, guidance, and civil penalty fund payouts. There was his absolutely bizarre and unsuccessful attempt to rebrand the CFPB as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), which would have cost the bureau $19 million and the industry $300 million if it had been implemented.

Most importantly, for our purposes, his leadership style marked a sharp break from the Cordray years. More reliance on political appointees and less on advisory boards. Significantly less access for rank-and-file staff. Decisions announced by directive or press release.

This set the stage for Kathy Kraninger, who was confirmed as the new Director of the CFPB in December of 2018.

CFPB staff from this era remember Kraninger, first and foremost, as an institutionalist. 

While not the inveterate financial services policy nerd that Cordray was (she wasn’t reading the footnotes), Kraninger was seen as open-minded and accessible to staff and often willing to defer to their expertise. She reinstituted all-hands meetings and town halls, but took a more streamlined approach to rulemaking and enforcement than Cordray had.

Given her appointment by President Trump, it shouldn’t be surprising that Kraninger was more friendly to industry. Under her leadership, the CFPB pared back several rules (e.g., the underwriting requirement from the original payday lending rule) and ramped up the bureau’s efforts to encourage innovation (e.g., no-action letters, sandboxes, TechSprints, etc.)

This isn’t to say that rulemaking and enforcement stopped, however. While the Kraninger-era CFPB took a more methodical and data-driven approach, new rules were still written during these years (the debt collection rule was the major one), and enforcement actions were still brought, although there were fewer than in the Cordray years and they tended to avoid novel UDAAP interpretations.

Also worth noting from the Kraninger era was the Supreme Court case Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, in which five of the Justices (including the CFPB’s old friend Brett Kavanaugh) found that the structure of the bureau (specifically, its single director who could only be removed from office “for cause”) to be unconstitutional.

This ruling altered the incentives for future Directors, starting with Rohit Chopra, who took over from Kraninger, after she stepped down at President Biden’s request in January of 2021.      

The Chopra Era

Before we get into the details of the Chopra era, which ran from October 2021 to February 2025, it’s worth setting the context. By the time he took over the bureau, a decade after it officially opened its doors, the environment had changed in several important ways.

First, the CFPB Director could be fired without cause by the President, thanks to the Seila Law decision. This essentially put a four-year political clock on all the work being done by the bureau, which naturally incentivized Chopra (and will, one imagines, incentivize future Directors) to advance policy objectives using the most expedient means possible.

Second, by 2021, the tech industry (both fintech startups and big tech companies like Apple) was playing a much more prominent role in the financial services ecosystem than it had been in 2011. This change mirrored a broader shift in society’s feelings about the tech industry over that time period, which evolved from being largely positive to decidedly mixed (particularly among progressive politicians and policy folks, many of whom ended up embedded throughout the Biden Administration).

Third, and finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves that banks and fintech companies have always complained about the CFPB, stretching back to its earliest days. Under Cordray, the criticism was that the bureau was drafting too many rules, when what the industry really needed was more flexible, less prescriptive guidance. Under Chopra, the CFPB did precisely that, focusing more on guidance and less on formal rulemaking. And, surprise, industry continued to complain, saying that they needed the certainty of rules, not vague and unhelpful guidance. This is the curse of being a regulator, and it’s helpful to remember if you want to properly contextualize the Chopra era.

Now, having said all that, the feedback that I got from the sources I spoke to for this story, who, again, span every era of the CFPB and a wide range of seniority levels and divisions, did not paint a flattering picture of the Chopra years.

From a process perspective, the comparison I heard most frequently for Chopra was Mick Mulvaney. A heavy reliance on political appointees rather than career staff and an insular, command-and-control model for policymaking that bore little resemblance to the exuberant collaboration of the Cordray years.

From a policy perspective, Chopra was, as one source described it, what Republicans and the banking lobby caricatured Richard Cordray as — aggressive, ideological, and broadly untrusting of corporations.

The effect of his approach can best be described using the three original pillars of the CFPB’s culture, described above:

1. Anti-capture. One of the chief complaints of the Chopra era was that the bureau’s leadership team was so focused on avoiding being captured by industry that it ended up being captured by consumer advocacy groups. Organizations like the National Consumer Law Center and the Center for Responsible Lending wielded enormous influence over the CFPB during the Biden Administration.   
2. Pro-competition. Under Chopra, the CFPB replaced the Kraninger-era no-action letter/sandbox initiatives with an Office of Competition & Innovation, which focused more on the structural barriers to competition in markets (e.g., AI, data portability, etc.), aligning with the Biden Administration’s overarching focus on antitrust issues. 
3. Wide-angle lens. Another complaint of the Chopra era was that the bureau went much further than it had under prior Directors (and, arguably, further than Congress intended) in expanding the perimeter of the CFPB’s supervision and enforcement authority. The most obvious example of this was Chopra’s focus on big tech companies and non-bank payments and digital wallet providers. However, the bureau’s interest in the finance-adjacent corners of the market extended even further, including initial forays into video games and airline reward programs.

The Chopra-era CFPB was also notable for its heavy reliance on novel or overly aggressive strategies to influence the direction of the market, beyond rulemaking and enforcement actions (both of which, it should be noted, surged back to Cordray-level highs). These included the use of “circulars” and “interpretive rules,” giving the CFPB’s opinion on how existing rules and statutes should be interpreted (without requiring a formal and rigorous rulemaking process), as well as new transparency initiatives (such as the public registry for repeat offenders), which critics argued were simply a way to shame financial services companies into taking the actions that the bureau had no legal authority to require.

One illustrative example of the latter strategy, which came up a few times in my conversations with sources, was the press release announcing a proposed settlement with LendUp, which the bureau had brought multiple enforcement actions against over the prior five years.

The announcement mentioned LendUp’s venture capital investors by name in the subtitle and text of the release, despite those firms not being mentioned anywhere in the actual legal complaint:

This decision upset the fintech VC and startup community, obviously, but it also perturbed career staff at the CFPB, who were accustomed to operating with a stricter duty of care.

The Vought Era

The Chopra era ended, as we all knew it would, on February 1st, 2025, when President Trump fired him and appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as Acting Director of the CFPB. 

One week later, repeating the playbook he used in 2017 with Mick Mulvaney, President Trump reassigned Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to serve as Acting Director.

Since then, the following things have happened:

• Vought instructed staff to pause virtually all work being done at the bureau, including exams, investigations, rulemakings, and even press releases.
• The White House nominated FDIC board member Jonathan McKernan to be the permanent Director, but subsequently withdrew the nomination.
• The bureau paused, postponed, rescinded, vacated, or otherwise backed away from a multitude of Chopra-era rules and proposals, including open banking, small business data collection, credit card late fees, and overdraft fees.
• The bureau dropped or moved to withdraw nearly two dozen pending enforcement actions, including high‑profile suits against EWS and Credit Acceptance Corp.
• Vought proposed barring the Civil Penalty Fund from financing consumer‑education projects, limiting it to direct restitution (which may, reportedly, include making the victims of the Synapse trainwreck whole?!? NARRATIVE VIOLATION!)
• Vought is actively working to reduce the CFPB workforce from 1,700 to about 200 “core‑statutory” employees.
• Republicans in the House of Representatives are attempting to reduce the cap on the CFPB’s funding mechanism by 50%.  

Which brings us right back to where we started — why is this happening? 

If there is a definitive answer to this question, I think it can be derived from the words of Marc Andreessen.

(Editor’s Note — That is a sentence I was hoping to never write.)

When Andreessen appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience back in November of last year, he went out of his way to talk about the CFPB:

This thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control. And it’s an “independent” agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants … it terrorizes financial institutions, prevents new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks … by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.

This is where a lot of the debanking comes from … under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a “politically exposed person” (PEP). And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off, out of your bank.  

As many observers (including myself) pointed out at the time, the second paragraph of that quote is complete nonsense. 

However, the first paragraph is worth careful examination.

“[The CFPB] is Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control.”

“It’s an ‘independent’ agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants.”

“[It] prevents new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks … by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.”

If you could hop in a time machine, go back to 2010, and ask them, these are not quotes that Elizabeth Warren, Raj Date, Rich Cordray, and the other founders and early employees of the CFPB would have wanted to be said about the bureau in 2024.

Their goal (and Dodd-Frank’s statutory mandate) for the CFPB was to be seen as a positive and powerful force for new competition. It was for the CFPB to be seen, genuinely, not in air quotes, as a credible, independent agency that can’t just do whatever it wants and isn’t secretly under Elizabeth Warren’s control.

In short, their goal was to create an agency that Marc Andreessen and other disruptors in the financial services space would appreciate and, in an ideal world, be protective of.

Bankers were always going to (mostly) hate the CFPB. 

Consumer advocates were always going to (mostly) love the CFPB. 

The swing vote — the one that would indicate whether the CFPB had successfully built and maintained a culture of consensus, compromise, and paradoxical conservatism — was the tech industry.

Sometime over the last 14 years, the CFPB lost that swing vote. 

It lost a big part of its institutional trust and credibility. 

And given the rising levels of political polarization and the sustained assault we’re seeing on the concept of regulatory independence, it may never get them back.