Over the course of nine years and more than 200 episodes, “How I Met Your Mother” took TV viewers on a long journey which had main character Ted Mosby revealing to his children the first day that he met their mother.
It’s taken more than nine years, but the truth about the naming of the CFPB appears to have come into focus as well.
And no, Elizabeth Warren didn’t do it, as acting director Mick Mulvaney has publicly suggested.
“CFPB doesn’t exist. CFPB has never existed,” Mulvaney told attendees at the recent American Bankers Association summit. “That entity does not exist. There is no such thing as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There is the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, and when we make our filings with the federal registry, we have always used that name, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. I’m not sure who made the decision. I think I can guess. She might be in the Senate.”
Mulvaney is correct – the Dodd-Frank Act never refers to the CFPB. In Title X, it says, “There is established in the Federal Reserve System, an independent bureau to be known as the ‘Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’, which shall regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services under the Federal consumer financial laws.”
That language, however, is just part of the story of the naming of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and how it came to be known as the CFPB. None of which involves Warren, now a senator from Massachusetts, renaming the bureau.
It’s an Agency
When the first contours of the statute which would establish the CFPB were laid out, the CFPB wasn’t the CFPB at all. It was the CFPA.
The bureau began its life in the House of Representatives as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, according to H.R. 3126, introduced by then-Rep. Barney Frank in July 2009.
“There is established the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as an independent agency in the executive branch to regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services under this title, the enumerated consumer laws, and the authorities transferred under subtitles F and H,” the bill stated.
Through the rest of 2009, that’s the way it mostly stayed, in a discussion draft in the Senate in November – “There is established the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which shall be an independent establishment, as defined under section 104 of title 5, United States Code, and shall regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services under this title, the enumerated consumer laws, and the authorities transferred under subtitles F and H” – and in the House version of the financial reform package introduced in December and passed later that month, which said, “There is established the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as an independent agency to regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services under this title, the enumerated consumer laws, and the authorities transferred under subtitles F and H.”
That’s the way it mostly stayed, because in the version of the Consumer Financial Protection Act passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the agency briefly became a commission. “There is established the Consumer Financial Protection Commission as an independent agency to regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services under this title, the enumerated consumer laws, and the authorities transferred under subtitles F and H,” the bill read.
It’s a Bureau
When the Senate took up its work in March 2010 on what would become the Dodd-Frank Act, for the first time, the agency became a bureau. “There is established in the Federal Reserve System the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, which shall regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services under the Federal consumer financial laws,” the Senate committee bill stated.
And that’s the language that stayed in the Senate version of the bill, introduced in April. But as the bill moved toward a vote by the full Senate, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) fought for a change back to the House version.
“There is established the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which shall be an independent establishment, as defined under section 104 of title 5, United States Code, and shall regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services under this title, the enumerated consumer laws, and the authorities transferred under subtitles F and H,” an amendment offered by Durbin in May 2010 stated.
Yet the amendment did not pass, and the final version of the Senate bill retained the language establishing the bureau, rather than the agency.
The Senate-passed version of financial reform is what became the base text for the conference committee which worked out differences between the House and Senate. As such, the language establishing a bureau, rather than an agency, remained in the bill and is what would be passed that July in the Dodd-Frank Act, stating, “There is established in the Federal Reserve System, an independent bureau to be known as the ‘Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’, which shall regulate the offering and provision of consumer financial products or services under the Federal consumer financial laws.”
Common reference held over
As little as two months earlier, though, some congressional members, such as Durbin, still were referring to the bureau as an agency, and the common shortening of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to CFPA had been in place for more the better part of a year.
A summary of the conference report, filed June 29, 2010, was written by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Although the conference report referred to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, the summary meshed the commonly used abbreviation with the new “bureau” language.
“Subtitle B: General Powers of the Bureau - (Sec. 1021) Requires the CFPB to implement and enforce federal consumer financial law to ensure that all consumers have access to fair, transparent, and competitive markets for consumer financial products and services.”
That same reference is repeated the next month, in the first CRS report on Title X following the passage of Dodd-Frank. It’s the first official government reference that can be found after passage, and the report was authored by legislative attorney David H. Carpenter.
“Title X of the Dodd-Frank Act is entitled the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 (CFPAct). The CFP Act establishes a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB or Bureau) within the Federal Reserve System with rulemaking, enforcement, and supervisory powers over many consumer financial products and services and the entities that sell them. The law also transfers to the Bureau the primary rulemaking and enforcement authority over many federal consumer protection laws enacted prior to the Dodd-Frank Act (the “enumerated consumerlaws”), such as the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act,” the report begins.
Thus, although the statute had officially created a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, the interchangeability of the CFPB and Bureau as references for it were established. The bill was signed July 21, 2010, meaning Carpenter’s report was issued within the first 10 days following enactment of the legislation.
Carpenter remains at CRS today, nearly eight years after that point, although he was unavailable for comment on the report, according to a CRS media contact. But his memorializing of the alternative references for the bureau, along with its common reference as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency for a year before passage, were etched in stone by September, when President Barack Obama held a press conference to announce that Warren would be appointed to get the bureau off the ground.
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was one of the central aspects of financial reform, will empower all Americans with the clear and concise information they need to make the best choices, the best financial decisions, for them and their families,” the president said in the Sept. 17, 2010, speech. “Never again will folks be confused or misled by the pages of barely understandable fine print that you find in agreements for credit cards or mortgages or student loans. The bureau is going to crack down on the abusive practices of unscrupulous mortgage lenders. It will reinforce the new credit card law that we passed, banning unfair rate hikes and ensure that folks aren’t unwittingly caught by overdraft fees when they sign up for a checking account. It will give students who take out college loans clear information and make sure that lenders don’t game the system. And it will ensure that every American receives a free credit score if they are denied a loan or insurance because of that score.
“Basically, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be a watchdog for the American consumer, charged with enforcing the toughest financial protections in history.”
And that is “How the CFPB Was Named.”
In the end, it was not one person who did the deed, but the naming was the culmination of 14 months of discussions and debates, cinched by the pen of an attorney within the CRS and put into words by the president.
Nine years later, much like the TV show, the CFPB’s run appears to be at an end.