Waters & Kraninger Head for Early Showdown
The new House Financial Services Chair and CFPB Director are likely to engage in a high-stakes battle over the operation of the CFPB.
It didn’t take long for the battle to begin over how the CFPB should approach its role in consumer financial protection.
This week, new CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger seemed to emphasize weighing the costs and benefits of the agency’s actions. Critics in the past have said that cost-benefit analysis doesn’t work.
And Thursday night, new House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in an interview on MSNBC that the committee will spend time trying to undo the damage she said former Acting Director Mick Mulvaney did to the agency.
Waters and Kraninger are likely to engage in a high-stakes battle over the operation of the CFPB. Kraninger has said she agrees with Mulvaney’s management of the agency.
Waters disagrees.
“He tried to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” she said in the interview Thursday.
In an email to staff this week, Kraninger wrote, in part, “I also want the bureau to respect the rights of all we serve and interact with, to safeguard their personal information, and to be transparent in its operations. We must do our work with an open mind and without presumptions of guilt, and to always carefully weigh the costs and benefits to consumers of our enforcement activities and regulatory rulemakings.”
She was not more specific than that.
However, the bureau is expected to be busy in the coming months.
The bureau last year said it intended to re-examine several of its rules, including its controversial payday loan rule.
The agency is also expected to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on debt collection issues by this spring.
Some 74 consumer and advocacy groups recently sent the agency its preferences for how the CFPB tackles that issue.
“Debt collection problems are a leading source of consumer complaints to the Consumer Bureau, which received approximately 84,500 complaints about debt collection in 2017,” the groups, which include the NAACP, Public Citizen and the Center for Responsible Lending, wrote.
“We particularly ask the Consumer Bureau to focus on preventing harassment, increasing consumer privacy, stopping the collection of time-barred debt, and improving the clarity and accuracy of debt collection notices,” the groups said when outlining their position.