So, No Regrets?

I was fortunate to get to know Steve Rattner, a onetime Obama administration “car czar” and economic analyst for MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a little during my brief tenure as a network contributor. He’s a genial fellow and a sincere and sharp analyst. You won’t hear me questioning his motives. But his recent attempt to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau misses the mark:

This is all beside the point. The CFPB could be the most efficient and cost-effective agency within the executive branch — its actions entirely pure in intent and bereft of unintended consequences (both of which are debatable propositions). That is the argument Democrats want to have — one about the virtue of CFPB’s abstract mission statement. But when it comes to Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, that is not the argument that Republicans are forcing the country to confront.

Rather, CFPB offices have been closed and its employees and contractors told to work from home because Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought, the bureau’s acting chief, inherited an agency with highly dubious funding mechanisms. As Vought explained:

This might have been an avoidable outcome if congressional Democrats had taken the GOP’s critiques of the agency’s funding contrivances seriously. Last May, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress’s attempt to fund the agency in perpetuity via the Federal Reserve would survive until either Congress reclaims the powers it delegated in relation to the agency’s operating budget or a future president looks askance at it. Even presidential authority over an agency that is supposedly under the White House’s control was an outgrowth of a 2020 case clarifying that the president is, in fact, the CFPB director’s boss. It should have been clear that Democratic efforts to insulate this agency from the verdicts rendered by voters in American elections would continue to be challenged.

Democrats could have tightened this all up at some point in the last decade, but they declined to do so. Instead, Democrats and Republicans talked past one another, with the latter emphasizing the outfit’s legal impropriety and the former focusing on all the noble works enabled by that unseemliness. Republicans have never found that argument sufficient to erase their misgivings about an agency deliberately structured to evade legislative oversight and executive control. The fact that CFPB’s supporters cling to it even though it is unrelated to the controversy of the day implicitly concedes that Vought has a point.