22 mar Before the bureau was created, payday lenders had been overseen mostly by state authorities
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That left a patchwork: 15 states in which payday loans were banned outright, a handful of states with strong enforcement - and large swaths of the country in which payday lending was mostly unregulated.
Then, almost as suddenly as an aggressive CFPB emerged, the Trump administration arrived with an agenda of undoing regulations. There was a resurgence of hope in the industry, which seems to be justified, at this point, said Jeremy Rosenblum, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr, who represents payday lenders. Rosenblum spoke to ProPublica and WNYC in a conference room at the Doral - filled with notepads, pens and little bowls of candy ily crest - where he had just led a session on compliance with federal and state laws. There was a profound sense of relief, or hope, for the first time. (Ballard Spahr occasionally represents ProPublica in legal matters.)
In Mick Mulvaney, who Trump appointed as interim chief of the CFPB in 2017, the industry got exactly the kind of person it had hoped for. As a congressman, Mulvaney had famously derided the agency as a sad, sick joke.
If anything, that phrase undersold Mulvaney's attempts to hamstring the agency as its chief. He froze new investigations, dropped enforcement actions en masse, requested a budget of $0 and seemed to mock the agency by attempting to officially re-order the words in the organization's name.
But Mulvaney's rhetoric sometimes exceeded his impact. His budget request was ignored, for example; the CFPB's name change was only fleeting. And besides, Mulvaney was always a part-timer, fitting in a few days a week at the CFPB while also heading the Office of Management and Budget, and then moving to the White House as acting chief of staff.