Calls to fire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray strengthened after President Donald Trump signed an executive order last Friday to roll back the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, told Stuart Varney on Fox Business that “personnel is policy” and urged President Trump to immediately fire the head of the CFPB.
“I think he has the legal authority to do that, and I would encourage our president to do that as soon as possible,” Hensarling said on the interview.
Hensarling added that it is a large and cumbersome project, which will take a lot of work. However, he said that getting rid of the head of the CFPB would be a “huge step in the right direction.”
The House Financial Services Committee shared the full interview between the two in the tweet below.
@RepHensarling: What #Obamacare is to household health care, #DoddFrank is to household finances. pic.twitter.com/zK2GZ48FIL
— Financial Services (@FinancialCmte) February 7, 2017
Plus, Trump might already have a replacement for Cordray too. Trump met with former Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, back in January as a possible pick to run the CFPB.
When the bureau was looking for a director back in 2011, Neugebauer expressed his concerns over the agency’s lack of oversight, a concern that’s plagued the agency since its creation.
And Neugebauer isn't the only option. Earlier this month, Sens. Deb Fischer, R-Nebraska; John Barrasso, R-Wyoming; and Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, introduced a bill that would replace the single director of the CFPB with a five-member bipartisan committee, a change the Republican Party has long pushed for.
Senate Democrats won’t let Cordray go easily though, adamantly fighting back against growing calls to have Cordray fired. One of those people includes Hensarling’s fellow Committee member, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is the ranking member of the committee. Led by Waters, Financial Services Committee Democrats wrote a joint letter, demanding that Trump reject any attempts to deregulate Wall Street by removing Cordray.
Under the current law, the president may remove the director for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
An article from the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, however, noted that no president has removed an appointee for cause. “Most presidents have not attempted it and the three times a president has tried to remove an official with for-cause protections—on the ground that the for-cause protection were invalid (not that there was cause for removals)—the courts stopped the president from doing so.”
