Consumer Financial Protection Bureau already sinking into scandal

It’s great to have Uncle Sam looking out for the little guy, isn’t it? That’s why it was such a super-duper, nifty idea for Washington to summon into being the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was created as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act back in 2010, but was originally the brainstorm of now Senator Elizabeth Warren. (You may recall she was initially slated to head the agency, but that was derailed by Congress.) So now that they are on the job, keeping citizens safe from big banking fat cats and ensuring financial responsibility and ethics, how are they doing?

Well… pretty much on par with what you’d expect out of any massive Washington bureaucracy. Right out of the gate, they inflated the cost of refurbishing their new digs by more than 100%, though they’ve tried to deny it.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray evidently is feeling unfamiliar heat after resorting to a disreputable form of sophistry as a substitute for honest discussion and debate. During a June 10 hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, for example, Cordray responded to a question from Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., on the ballooning cost of CFPB’s headquarters renovation by saying: “This has been out there and taken as gospel in the public record for some time. It’s a fiction of the Washington Examiner that this project started out at $55 million and now has ballooned to higher proportions. There never was any expectation that this project could be completed for $55 million. That is false.”

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