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Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, recently told a group of reporters that news about changes at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under the Trump administration could be imminent.
The news was first reported by American Banker. Scott told a group of reporters that he is looking “forward to a blockbuster announcement sometime soon as relates to who will be over at the CFPB,” according to the outlet.
Scott added that he had urged the administration to fire incumbent director Rohit Chopra, but that the delay in bringing a new director or acting director aboard could come from the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, which established procedures for appointing acting leaders to head up government agencies.
One of the law’s provisions is the order by which an acting director is appointed. Once a leadership vacancy opens, there are three eligible classes of people who can serve in an acting director position. These include the “first assistant to the office,” someone else currently serving in a Senate-confirmed position, or a senior officer or appointee of the same agency as long as they are in a certain federal pay scale and other conditions are met.
There are no such viable staffers or appointees that the Trump administration would be able to push forward, Scott suggested. But he said that answers should be “imminent” and “public,” and that he and other administration allies “will be happy,” according to the report.
Scott also said that he is looking forward to taking a broader view of the CFPB’s funding structure and identifying any functions already being done by other federal agencies as targets of potential cuts inside the bureau itself.
Chopra and the CFPB have been regular targets of the president and his allies. Republicans routinely accuse the bureau of overstepping its enforcement authority, and conservative interests have repeatedly tried to dismantle the bureau through the U.S. court system.
The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the constitutional validity of the CFPB on multiple occasions, but it has never gone as far as dismantling the agency altogether. Most recently, the court rejected a challenge to the bureau’s funding structure in a decision handed down last year.
In 2020, the court cleared the way for a sitting president to fire the CFPB director, who was previously insulated from such executive action. President Joe Biden took advantage of this when entering office in 2021, forcing out then-director Kathy Kraninger before Chopra was eventually confirmed to the position in September 2021.
Chopra remains CFPB director more than a week into the new presidential term. He has said he will respect a directive to step down if it comes from the president but plans to stay on the job until that point.
