Mulvaney Fires All 25 Members of CFPB Advisory Board

Now this is what I call “draining the swamp”:

The Daily Caller:

Mick Mulvaney, acting director of a controversial consumer finance bureau, fired an advisory board after the members criticized the new leadership for not taking their advice.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced Wednesday that the 25 current Consumer Advisory Board members will be replaced, and will be ineligible to reapply to the board, the Washington Post reports.

Eleven advisory board members held a news conference Monday calling out Mulvaney for canceling several meetings — which are required to take place under the Dodd-Frank Act which created the agency.

“It appears the bureau does not want to engage with us,” Ann Baddour, chair of the Consumer Advisory Board and part of Texas Appleseed, a financial, non-profit, said in a conference call reported by The Intercept. “Staying silent would violate our ethical responsibility to the bureau and the American people.”

The criticisms didn’t sit well with the CFPB, and one spokesman suggested the board missed the perks of taxpayer-funded trips to the capital.

“The outspoken members of the Consumer Advisory Board seem more concerned about protecting their taxpayer-funded junkets to Washington, D.C., and being wined and dined by the Bureau than protecting consumers,” CFPB spokesman John Czwartacki said in a statement.

Besides being totally useless, the CFPB’s mission is abhorrent to American values. It’s primary purpose is to protect people from their own stupidity. If someone is dumb enough to buy too much house for their income, or use a payday loan shark, or take out a mortgage where they didn’t bother to read the fine print, why should the rest of us suffer by experiencing more difficulty and dealing with more paperwork and higher rates when we want a loan or want to open a brokerage account?

The agency’s existence is based on the idiotic meme that the financial meltdown came because mortgage lenders swindled consumers and forced them to take on mortgages they couldn’t possibly repay. The CFPB is one swamp that not only needs draining, but also needs to be paved over and used as a parking lot.