Mulvaney installs 6 Trump loyalists at CFPB after revelations of anti-administration ‘Dumbledore’s Army’ uprising
Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has installed six Trump loyalists in the agency. The news comes in the wake of revelations about a cadre of anti-Trump CFPB employees who called themselves “Dumbledore’s Army,” a reference to an anti-fascist underground group of students in the Harry Potter books.
As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim reports, Mulvaney announced in a Thursday memo his intention to bring those administration loyalists into the bureau that “by statute, is supposed to be an independent agency that was created in the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis.”
Mulvaney’s short tenure at the helm of the CFPB has already been rife with controversy. In late November, President Donald Trump named him acting director of the agency when the former director stepped down. The move immediately caused scandal because Mulvaney also leads the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — and because the outgoing director had already named his former chief of staff, Leandra English, as his interim successor. Soon after, news that Mulvaney was directing staff to “disregard” English appeared — hence the cabal of resisters within the agency.
As The Washington Post reported shortly after it became clear Mulvaney was taking the reigns of the agency despite mounting legal challenges, the job makes him one of the most powerful men in the country.
The director of the CFPB, a federal judge quoted by the Post once noted, “enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of the U.S. Government, other than the President.”
Of his six new hires, Grim noted Thursday, only three will work full-time for the agency — the other three, like the director himself, will split their time between the supposedly-independent bureau and their other jobs within the Trump administration.