Acting CFPB Director Vought has halted supervision and other CFPB activities and won’t take money from the Fed in the next quarter

The NY Times report, by Ryan Mac and Stacy Cowley, is here. The Bureau already has a balance of over $700 million. As Bloomberg Law’s Evan Weinberger has pointed out, Trump’s first CFPB acting director, Mick Mulvaney, also declined to take money from the Fed for the CFPB and then ended up asking for quite a bit. The interruption of supervision raises questions about whether the Bureau is violating the Consumer Financial Protection Act. The Times report includes this sentence: “The agency, created by Congress in 2011 as a financial industry watchdog, cannot be closed without congressional action, but its director can freeze most of its actions by halting enforcement, weakening or repealing regulations and softening its supervision of banks and other lenders.” CFPB union members protested the administration’s activities outside the Bureau’s offices yesterday