A conservative lawmaker who has repeatedly tried to hamstring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now claiming it hasn’t done enough to clampdown on banking abuses.
Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) hit out at the agency’s director on Wednesday, accusing Richard Cordray and his staff of incompetence. She said the CFPB should have acted sooner, when Wells Fargo was signing up millions of customers for financial products without their consent.
“The only conclusion there is to draw from the Wells Fargo scandal is that CFPB was asleep at the wheel,” she said.
Wagner based her analysis on the fact that the bureau didn’t move from supervisory to enforcement action until around the same time as Los Angeles law enforcement officials.
“Your investigation was far from independent and comprehensive, sir,” she added.
Cordray scoffed at the notion, saying: “we’re in contact with officials around the country,” as part of normal operations.
Last year, the bureau joined Los Angeles prosecutors and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to penalize Wells Fargo for its unauthorized sales. The bank admitted to improperly opening more than 2 million accounts, in their customers’ names, between 2011 and 2015.
The CFPB, the OCC and Los Angeles officials fined Wells Fargo $185 million, after investigating the banks’ practices. Former Wells CEO, John Stumpf, resigned in the aftermath.
The enforcement was regarded as a triumph for the CFPB, which has been under heavy assault by Republicans since it was established in 2010 by Dodd-Frank financial reform.
Democrats were, therefore, somewhat amused by Rep. Wagner’s line of questioning, having sat through her anti-CFPB tirades in the past.
“First they complained that you enforced too much. Now we just heard a ten minute rant that you didn’t enforce enough,” Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) told Cordray, immediately after Wagner finished her inquiry.
“Boy, they really hate you,” Capuano had also quipped.
“They don’t want to give us any credit for anything good that we do,” Cordray replied. “I understand that’s part of the game.”
Rep. Wagner has routinely boasted of her efforts to defang the CFPB. She said in Facebook post last autumn that it was “deceivingly named” and “continues to stunt small business growth and job creation.” Just two weeks ago, she chaired a subcommittee hearing dedicated entirely to attacking the bureau as an “unaccountable behemoth.”
“[T]he CFPB has become confident in its cloak of unaccountability by pursuing policy and regulating entities outside of its authorized scope to the detriment of consumers,” she said at the hearing.
A major newspaper that serves Wagner’s constituency reacted to the panel by noting she is “among the top recipients of campaign donations from the financial services industry.”
“Wagner’s efforts to hobble the agency are shameful,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said, in an editorial. “We wouldn’t be surprised if her big donors wear swamp boots whenever they wade into her office.
