Time.com: Buried in Trump’s Budget: A New Attempt to Kill a Powerful Consumer Watchdog

Here. The whole article is worth reading, but here's an excerpt:

Buried deep in President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget request to Congress—specifically, on page 158 out of 159 pages in the supplemental "Major Savings and Reforms" document—is a section headed “Restructure the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” It appears to be yet another Republican shot across the bow against the embattled consumer protection agency—but in this case, it's an action Congress currently has no authority to implement.

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Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget—which was presented to Congress on Tuesday—proposes to restructure the CFPB, limit the agency's mandatory funding in 2018, and provide discretionary appropriations to fund it beginning in 2019. The budget estimates that this "restructuring" will yield a cost savings of $6.8 billion of the next 10 years. When you consider that the CFPB’s budget for the fiscal year of 2016 was roughly $600 million, however—just under a 10th of that amount—such a move sounds more like total elimination.

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Currently, the CFPB’s funding comes from the Federal Reserve, not Congress. So Trump’s budget seems to assume that the agency’s budget will fall under Congressional control at some point this year.

“We’re scratching our heads, especially when you consider the CFPB is not funded by taxpayer money,” [Allied Progress executive director Karl] Frisch says. “I don’t know how you can cut something from the budget that isn’t in the budget.”

 
 
 

 

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