In the post-holiday haze, we've watched Washington turn up the volume on the amount of really outrageous decisions and actions coming from our elected (and unelected) officials. I like my nation's capital like I like my monuments: Cold with a few cracks in it, but otherwise stable and with a sno-cone vendor nearby.

What I can't handle – or maybe I'm too easily distracted – are the consistent waves of crazy news from top to bottom. If I had a full-time staff of 25 people, we could maybe keep up with all of the regulatory issues, decisions, votes and backstories that are playing out across this administration and the agencies built to support our credit unions and members. Alas, there are days where we have to pick and choose the stories because, “There's just so much happening, so fast,” said me on several calls.

Let me fill you in on one of those issues/areas where I hope to get in even deeper as the year goes on: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also known as the CFPB, or as some in the credit union space call it, “That f**king agency!”

Think of the CFPB like this: Your parents get divorced. Your mom remarries. And you absolutely hate this new guy in the house. So, you choose to throw a fit, ignore him and yell at him for accidentally breaking your favorite cereal bowl and be pissed at all of the other changes happening in your house. Then, after your bratty self actually sees that your mom is happy and you're just ticked because you don't know any better and are a self-absorbed teenager, you see that these changes, while weird and sometimes difficult, are a good thing for the whole house and the entire family.

The CFPB (your new stepdad) came in with the best intentions and maybe broke a few things and pissed you off, but once you stopped being mad about the new rules, maybe you could see that Stepdad is just trying to do his/its best; he even tried to buy you off with a new PS4. Totally worked.

Your positive or negative feelings of the agency aside, it WAS set up to help consumers, credit union members and those who can't afford to take on the big financial firms out there. And in reality, it was successful in its attempt to refund and hand over hundreds of millions of dollars back to consumers from shady scumbags out there ripping us off. What also happened was it became tangled up in a mess of a do-gooder philosophy and mission statement that couldn't jive with the status-quo bureaucracy. So we saw new regulations and red tape coming out of the CFPB that were being applied to credit unions, instead of just the big fish out there like Wells Fargo and Bank of America that were proven to be (just some of) the greedy ones that caused the CFPB to be created in the first place.

Until this past year, the agency was on a path where credit unions and the big banking industry hated everything it did, everything it wanted to do and everything it stood for because, as one friend of mine put it, “We don't need to be parented!” That's a fair statement.

Former CFPB Director Richard Cordray did what he could with what he had to work with in starting the agency and getting it to where it was in the fall of last year when he stepped down. Where was it in October of 2017? Polls done by American Future Fund, a GOP polling company, found that the public overwhelmingly loved what the agency was doing for consumers. For instance, AFF found bipartisan consumer support for the CFPB's proposed Arbitration Rule, especially in the wake of the Equifax data breach. According to The Hill, “The survey results found that 64% of Republicans, 67% of Independents and 74% of Democrats who responded to the poll backed the CFPB effort.”

On Nov. 1, 2017, President Trump signed the joint resolution passed by Congress disapproving the rule. Thanks consumers for your input, we're just going to do whateverthehell we want over here. Thanks, come again. Bye-bye.

Enter Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney, and the President's current head of the Office of Management and Budget, as well as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus. Since Mulvaney stepped into this role at the CFPB, and taken cues from the President, he's dismantling the rules and the agency in big and small chunks nearly every day. Earlier this month, on the day it was to go into effect, Mulvaney announced the new payday-lending rules are being reconsidered and now on hold. The CFPB staff worked on this issue for more than two years. The next day, Mulvaney announced the CFPB dropped the three-year investigation into the marketing and lending practices of World Acceptance Corp., one of the largest payday lenders in the country and Mexico. No reason was given by Mulvaney. Sure, World Acceptance Corp. has made campaign donations to Mulvaney and is from his home state of South Carolina. Sure, hundreds and hundreds of consumers filed official complaints about World Acceptance Corp.

On the same day of this announcement, Mulvaney wrote to his CFPB staff a memo stating, “The CFPB has a new mission: We will exercise, with humility and prudence, the almost unparalleled power Congress has bestowed on us. But we go no further. The days of aggressively 'pushing the envelope' are over.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Mulvaney appears to think he's pulled Excalibur's sword from the stone and the CFPB has some magical power handed over by God, to Merlin, to Mulvaney.

Recently the House Financial Services Committee approved a measure that credit unions with less than $50 billion in assets would be exempt from CFPB rules. It appears that your voices were heard – or is this just another massive and grotesque example of how money trumps the needs of members and consumers?

Or maybe the next head of the CFPB will be a banker. That should totally help “even the scales” as many credit union leaders continually complain about.

Whatever the case, it looks like mom is getting another divorce.

Michael Ogden is executive editor for CU Times. He can be reached at mogden@cutimes.com.

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