Just when you trained your word processing software to accept the acronym “CFPB” as the short way to refer to the federal consumer financial protection agency, the acting head of the organization changes the letters around: get ready to use “BCFP.”
In remarks to a conference of the American Bankers Association (ABA) in Washington, the acting head of the agency said he is officially changing the name to “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection,” instead of the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” as it has been known since its inception eight years ago.
In making the announcement, Acting Director Mick Mulvaney read the statutory language from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank), to the applause of the audience of bankers.
“It’s really disconcerting I received applause for actually reading legislation,” Mulvaney said.
In making the change to the agency’s acronym, Mulvaney indicated he was only following the law. “That is what the law says,” Mulvaney noted; he also said the first thing he did when he was named acting director of the agency in November was to “read the law” creating the bureau.
In other comments, the acting bureau head said that the law requires the bureau to run consumer comment database, but not that he has to run a “Yelp” for bank consumers funded by the federal government — and nothing in the law says data has to be available to public.
Additionally, Mulvaney told the bankers that the BCFP will be “no longer doing regulation by enforcement,” and that the agency will still enforce the law “but to make sure everyone knows the law.”