Republicans Want to Sideline This Regulator. But It May Be Too Popular.
But they also consider him a “definitely ideological” — in the words of Richard Hunt, the chief executive of the Consumer
Bankers Association, a banking trade group — leader of an agency that is structured like “a dictatorship.”
“Richard Cordray has gone above and beyond to take C. E.O.s to task on things that he had no jurisdiction over,” Mr. Hunt said.
“The public does not share the G. O.P.’s ire toward the agency or its mission,” said Dean Clancy, a Tea Party activist who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush
and is now a policy analyst who tracks actions of the consumer bureau.
In the weeks after the election, Richard Cordray, the Democrat who leads the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, directed his staff to compile stories from ordinary Americans thanking it for resolving complaints.
Mr. Cordray, in a response to Mr. Noreika, said the idea
that class actions were a threat to the banking system was “plainly frivolous.” (He also said he had already sent the rule to the Federal Register for publication a week before he received Mr. Noreika’s letter.)
While many federal agencies have begun to loosen the reins on the companies they regulate, the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, born out of the Dodd-Frank financial law in 2010, has taken the opposite course.
WASHINGTON — With the election of President Trump, the nation’s consumer watchdog agency faced a quandary: how to shield the
Obama-era institution from a Republican administration determined to loosen the federal government’s grip on business.
