The Consumer Financial Protection Act, the CFPB’s organic statute, requires the Bureau to do certain things. For example, 12 U.S.C. § 5514(b)(1) provides that “The Bureau shall require reports and conduct examinations on a periodic basis (emphasis added).” I don’t see how the pause could lawfully affect periodic supervision, then, and my understanding of the memo announcing the pause is that it did not purport to address supervision. But now look at 12 U.S.C. § 5511(a), which says: “The Bureau shall seek to implement and, where applicable, enforce Federal consumer financial law consistently for the purpose of ensuring that all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services and that markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive (more emphasis added).” Because the Bureau “shall seek to implement and, where applicable, enforce federal consumer financial law,” it seems to me that the Bureau’s discretion to forego enforcement is also limited, as long as the enforcement is for the purposes specified in that sentence. And yet my understanding of the pause memo is that it pauses all enforcement actions. That sounds like a violation of the CFPA.
