Nadia Prupis – Trump Considering GOP Lawmaker Who Despises Consumer Watchdog To Head It

President-elect Donald Trump is getting closer to debilitating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog agency founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that many warned could be an early target for the incoming administration.

Trump on Wednesday met with former Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), who the Huffington Post reports is a front-runner to take over the agency if the president-elect decides to fire its current chief, Richard Cordray.

Like many of Trump’s other picks for agency chiefs, Neugebauer has a track record of opposing the department. While in Congress, he opposed the CFPB on numerous rules, including the first-ever federal crackdown on payday lenders, and introduced a bill to weaken the agency.

Warren, who is known as a financial watchdog on Capitol Hill, called for the CFPB to be created in 2010 as part of a federal response to the 2008 economic crisis. As HuffPost notes, under Cordray, the agency has been able to return “$12 billion to 27 million people caught up in various scams, passed pro-consumer rules on issues like mandatory arbitration and mortgage disclosure, and hit banks for conning customers into paying for expensive add-on products that don’t do much.”

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