The U.S. Justice Department argued Friday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be stripped of its independence, a reversal of an earlier stance that the president only had the power to remove the Obama-era agency's director for cause, not at will.

Justice Department lawyers told a Washington federal appeals court that the CFPB's single-director design "lacks those critical structural attributes that have been thought to justify 'independent' status for multi-member regulatory commissions."

"Moreover, because a single agency head is unchecked by the constraints of group decision-making among members appointed by different presidents, there is a greater risk that an 'independent' agency headed by a single person will engage in extreme departures from the president's executive policy," the Justice Department said in a friend of the court brief.