Interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Mick Mulvaney said to bankers and lobbyists on Tuesday that they need to start giving more campaign contributions if they want to weaken the powers of the bureau he runs.
According to The New York Times, Mulvaney told more than a thousand bankers and lobbyists at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington that when he was a congressman he only talked to lobbyists that had given him money. For Mulvaney, trying to sway legislators through donations is one of the “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy,” the Times reported.
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you,” Mulvaney explained to the 1,300 banking industry officials at the American Bankers Association conference. “If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
The Times also wrote that payday lenders gave Mulvaney nearly $63,000.
Mulvaney is running for Congress to further limit the powers of the CFPB by cutting its funding. This would give lawmakers and those capable of influencing and financing them more power over the bureau. In order for him to accomplish this, he urged the bankers and lobbyists to start donating more to campaigns.
Mulvaney, who also runs the White House’s budget office, is a longtime critic of the bureau he was appointed by President Donald Trump to temporarily run. Since taking the position as CFPB director, Mulvaney stopped all of the active investigations and slowed down inquiries.
Meanwhile, he has also weakened the bureau’s effort to go after financial services companies accused of targeting vulnerable customers. The CFPB was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law and was meant to prevent financial institutions from preying on vulnerable consumers. However, Republicans have long argued that the bureau has unchecked power and is too aggressive in its regulation of financial firms.
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