It looks like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is sticking with its name.
Back in March, former acting CFPB chief Mick Mulvaney – who is now serving as President Trump’s acting White House Chief of Staff while maintaining his previous position as Director of the Office of Management and Budget – said he wanted to change the name of the agency to “the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection,” its formal legal name as defined by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. In other words, the CFPB was to become the BCFP, and Mulvaney got as far in his renaming project as rearranging the letters in the lobby at the agency’s headquarters.
However, Kathy Kraninger, the agency’s new director, announced Wednesday that she was putting an end to the name change effort. “I care much more about what we do than what we are called,” Kraninger told CFPB employees. In a refreshing burst of commons sense, Kraninger noted that, “Many of us have legal names but use nicknames without much confusion,” adding that she is often called Kathy rather than her legal name, Kathleen.
The reasons for the name change were never entirely clear, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week called for an investigation, expressing concern that “that the name change effort imposes unnecessary and significant costs on taxpayers and the business community, deprives the CFPB of funds it can use to protect consumers, and violates legal requirements.” Internal reports estimated that the name change would cost the agency between $9 million and $19 million, while imposing a cost of roughly $300 million on banks and other organizations under regulation.
