By Douglas Gillison
(Reuters) – The US Consumer Financial Protection Office published a list on Friday on nearly 70 political and regulatory orientation documents go back to more than a decade that the agency plans to cancel.
The announcement, which was not final, was the last stage of the radical reorientation of the CFPB labor administration under President Donald Trump.
The agency, created after the 2008 financial crisis to serve as a guard dog for American consumers against predatory business practices, did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
The canceled documents have provided monitoring of policies and guidelines on questions as varied as debt collections in nursing homes, the supervision of companies offering financial services to the military, discrimination in loans based on sex and sexual orientation and the publication of data on consumer complaints. Some were policies and advice issued as part of the Anterior Trump administration.
In a notice published Friday on the Federal Register website, the acting director of the CFPB, Russell Vought, said that policy documents – which offer interpretations of the existing law and announce the priorities of the office – sometimes imposed illegal requirements on companies or simply increased the unnecessarily regulatory burden.
Even when the orientation documents were not necessarily inappropriate, “it is the current office of the office to avoid publishing advice, unless necessary and when the charges of conformity would be reduced rather than to increase,” said Vought.
Republicans have long accused that the CFPB has used these policy documents to avoid publishing regulations subject to public comments and legal challenges.
The decision to delete them is not yet final, but the office will not apply them during a pending examination, according to Vought.
In a statement, Brady Williams, legal advisor to Better Markets, who recommends stricter financial surveillance, said that the CFPB’s decision implied that it could dismantle its consumer complaint database which is addressed to the public.
“It is not only bureaucratic housekeeping. This is a calculated demolition of the tools on which consumers and defenders count to protect themselves from financial violence,” said Williams.
Rob Nichols, head of the American Bankers Association, an industry lobby, praised the move, affirming in a statement that he hoped that it marked a “turning point” for the CFPB approach to regulation.
Before Trump files the former director of the CFPB, Rohit Chopra, in February, the agency published a collection of its orientation documents, noting that by virtue of a Supreme Court decision last year, the courts and not the federal agencies, will have the last word on the way in which the regulatory laws of the mysteries must be interpreted.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison; edition by Pete Schroeder and Aurora Ellis)
