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Despite Republican claims to the contrary, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is accountable to lawmakers and the American public, Director Richard Cordray is expected to tell the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.
March 11 -
The Supreme Court has denied hearing another case against the National Labor Relations Board that calls into question the president's recess appointment authority.
February 7
Both sides in the political debate over the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got fresh ammunition from a think-tank report released Thursday.
The report from the Bipartisan Policy Center finds that the process of nominating and confirming top officials at federal financial regulators takes much longer when the agencies are headed by a single director rather than by a commission.
That finding should prove helpful to congressional Republicans who are pushing to replace the CFPB's single director with a multi-member board.
But the report also concludes that the Senate has been slower to act on President Obama's nominations at financial regulatory agencies than it was on President George W. Bush's nominations. That point may bolster congressional Democrats' argument that their GOP colleagues are engaging in obstructionism.
The report's authors took pains to stay out of the political fray, saying that they hope the findings will inform the discussion.
"What we found was there's a tremendous debate," says Aaron Klein, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's financial regulatory reform initiative. "We found there was a lack of data."
The report comes amid in a nearly two-year-old partisan stalemate over the structure of the consumer agency. More than 40 Senate Republicans vow to oppose any nominee to head the agency unless its single director is replaced with a commission, among other demands.
The Bipartisan Policy Center's report examined the nomination process for top posts at 13 financial regulatory agencies since Jan. 1, 2000. The list of agencies includes banking regulators, market regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, housing regulators, and agencies created by the Dodd-Frank Act.
At agencies headed by a single director, the president took an average of 439 days to make a nomination, and the Senate took an additional 229 days to resolve that nomination, either by confirming the nominee or returning the nomination. "It is striking that on average it took almost two years for a vacancy at a single-director agency to be resolved," the report states.
Perhaps most remarkably, two agencies led by single heads have never had a Senate-confirmed director. One is the CFPB, whose creation dates back in 2010. The other is the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which Congress created in 2008.
The path traveled by commission chairs was far less treacherous. It took the president an average of 74 days to nominate them, and the Senate resolved their nominations in an average of 134 days. All told, the process took an average of about seven months.
In between those two extremes was the experience of nominees to join commissions but not to serve as chair. Their process from start to finish took an average of about one year.
The report also found that the Senate acted on President Bush's nominees in an average of 98 days, as compared to 162 days for President Obama's nominees.
At the same time, President Obama took longer than President Bush to make nominations — an average of 233 days, compared with the 181-day average under his predecessor.
