Republicans Want to Sideline This Regulator. But It May Be Too Popular.<br />But they also consider him a “definitely ideological” — in the words of Richard Hunt, the chief executive of the Consumer<br />Bankers Association, a banking trade group — leader of an agency that is structured like “a dictatorship.”<br />“Richard Cordray has gone above and beyond to take C. E.O.s to task on things that he had no jurisdiction over,” Mr. Hunt said.<br />“The public does not share the G. O.P.’s ire toward the agency or its mission,” said Dean Clancy, a Tea Party activist who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush<br />and is now a policy analyst who tracks actions of the consumer bureau.<br />In the weeks after the election, Richard Cordray, the Democrat who leads the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection<br />Bureau, directed his staff to compile stories from ordinary Americans thanking it for resolving complaints.<br />Mr. Cordray, in a response to Mr. Noreika, said the idea<br />that class actions were a threat to the banking system was “plainly frivolous.” (He also said he had already sent the rule to the Federal Register for publication a week before he received Mr. Noreika’s letter.)<br />While many federal agencies have begun to loosen the reins on the companies they regulate, the Consumer Financial<br />Protection Bureau, born out of the Dodd-Frank financial law in 2010, has taken the opposite course.<br />WASHINGTON — With the election of President Trump, the nation’s consumer watchdog agency faced a quandary: how to shield the<br />Obama-era institution from a Republican administration determined to loosen the federal government’s grip on business.
