by Jeff Sovern
According to ThinkAdvisor, Georgia Senator David Perdue has introduced an amendment that would subject the CFPB to the congressional appropriations process. Calling the Bureau "reckless," Perdue added "the CFPB is a rogue agency that dishes out malicious financial policy and creates new rules and regulations without any oversight from Congress. As seems to be the usual Republican practice in these matters, Perdue did not give any examples of reckless, rogue, or malicious conduct. As we have blogged about before, efforts to subject the Bureau to the congressional appropriations process are really attempts to give the industry a veto over the Bureau's activities, so that the regulated control their regulator. If Senator Perdue is genuinely concerned about rogue financial industry regulators, maybe he should look into whether the determinations by the Office of Thrift Supervision (which has since been folded into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and the National Credit Union Administration that his state's statute prohibiting predatory lending practices was preempted contributed to the disastrous lending that led to the Great Recession.
