Op-Ed: Kyrsten Sinema: End the CFPB’s political football by creating a bipartisan commission

Most of us remember the financial crisis of 2008, when millions of Americans lost their jobs and
homes. In response, Congress passed a massive reform law called the Dodd-Frank Act. That law was designed to protect American financial institutions and consumers from facing another such crisis in the future. I came to the US House in the years following passage of Dodd-Frank, not long after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created as part of Dodd-Frank.

The CFPB was a fine idea in theory – an independent agency that would stick up for and protect
consumers from shady, illegal practices. The agency had potential to help consumers recover
from scams, to have somewhere for them to go when wronged, a place to learn financial literacy
to make sound decisions. It was a new agency when I got to Congress, and yet I saw that the two parties were already fighting over the agency and its leadership.

Back then, I believed that the CFPB would be best served by a multi-person bipartisan
commission, with staggered terms to ensure that no one party or opinion could sway the
fundamentally non-partisan work of protecting consumers. I spent years working on a bill that
would change CFPB leadership from one appointed person to a bipartisan commission that
would outlast any one administration – ensuring continuity and bipartisanship regardless of
short-term political winds.

That bill never made it to a President’s desk – the party in charge was never interested in making the change. And now, here we are more than a decade and a half into the CFPB’s existence, and the CFPB is one of the most political and contentious agencies in Washington.

In the last administration, the CFPB’s Director spent an awful lot of time pursuing an agenda that was beyond the agency’s scope. As administrations change, the pendulum swings the other
direction, with cuts to funding and staffing that may hinder the agency’s ability to help
consumers in a fast-changing financial marketplace.

Policy volatility has become the coin of the realm in Washington over the last two decades, but
the fallout is uncertainty for businesses and confusion for consumers. The United States’
financial marketplace is rapidly changing, with new entrants to the market, technological
innovations and disruptions, and more. These changes mean more choices facing American
consumers, but without clear rules of the road and fair practices for all, consumers risk getting
fleeced by bad actors.

Having a capable and credible consumer watchdog agency is more important now than ever.
Congress can end the CFPB’s political football and establish a bipartisan commission with
strong congressional review to ensure that the agency has a clear mandate, transparency in its
operations, limits on its power, and accountability to the US government and the consumers it
serves.