Scott Bessent appointed acting director of CFPB

The new Treasury Secretary is expected to make the consumer protection bureau less adversarial

Scott Bessent appointed acting director of CFPB

The new Treasury Secretary is expected to make the consumer protection bureau less adversarial
Scott_Bessent_

Newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will step in as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Bessent was appointed as the agency’s director after President Donald Trump fired Biden appointee Rohit Chopra via email on Saturday. He is expected to oversee the bureau until a full-time director is nominated and confirmed.

“I look forward to working with the CFPB to advance President Trump’s agenda to lower costs for the American people and accelerate economic growth,” Bessent said in a statement on the CFPB web page.

Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who won Senate confirmation a week ago as Treasury secretary, immediately directed the bureau’s staff to stop any activity that is related to enforcement, litigation and public communications, according to Politico. He also directed staff to stop all rulemaking and suspend the effective dates of rules that haven’t gone into effect yet. In an email from the office of the director, Bessent explained that the moves will help “promote consistency with the goals of the administration.”

Bessent’s appointment at the CFPB signals a move away from “a heavy-handed and adversarial approach under Chopra to a more constructive and common-sense relationship with the financial firms the Bureau regulates,” said Peter Idziak, a senior associate with Polunsky Beitel Green, a law firm for residential mortgage lenders.

Bessent recognizes the CFPB was created by Congress and won’t likely “seek to unilaterally ‘delete’ the Bureau, as Elon Musk has previously called for,” Idziak said.

“But I expect he will move quickly to rescind several rules passed under Chopra that have proven costly to the industry and likely resulted in higher costs for consumers,” he said.

House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said Chopra’s firing was the “first step by Trump, his co-President Elon Musk, and their Republican allies in Congress to dismantle the agency entirely.” 

Author

  • Victor Whitman

    Victor Whitman is a contributing writer for Scotsman Guide and a former editor of the publication’s commercial magazine. 

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