Barr Delivers Remarks at Hearing to Review CFPB Financial Reporting & Transparency

Barr Delivers Remarks at Hearing to Review CFPB Financial Reporting & Transparency

Washington, April 16, 2024 -

Read Chairman Barr's opening remarks as prepared for delivery:

"The CFPB is increasingly out of control and lacks transparency because there are virtually no checks on the agency's power.

"As the most recent example of the lack of transparency and accountability towards Congress, a request was made by this Subcommittee for the CFPB to provide a witness for today's hearing, but the CFPB declined.

"While the GAO audits the CFPB's attestations about its financial condition, those audits have important caveats identifying that GAO is only monitoring numbers and not policy or budgeting decisions.

"Moreover, an additional 'independent audit' is required by statute, but the CFPB does not seem to take this mandate seriously. The most recent audit was a mere 9 pages long and curiously contained zero findings or recommendations.

"Due to this lack of oversight, the CFPB has acted unilaterally and arbitrarily outside of its statutory mandate, routinely without engaging in notice and comment rulemaking and instead operating through rulemaking by guidance, press releases, or blog posts. Further, the agency has engaged in enforcement threats without adjudication.

"A rogue CFPB under Director Chopra is no help to consumers, even if advocates of the CFPB tout the amount of fines and damages awards the CFPB claims to have generated.

"The sanctions generated have costs and they also come at the social cost of Director Chopra's blanket indictments of hard-working and honest workers throughout the financial system.

"These institutions play by the rules, help consumers, and provide fair financial services.

Yet, their reputations are unfairly tarnished through Director Chopra's portrayal of them as crooks who are out to take advantage of their fellow Americans.

"Courts have acted to strike down numerous CFPB unlawful actions under Director Chopra as he continues to far overstep what he views as unbounded authority and power.

"And courts must play that role partly because Congress has no ability to rein in the CFPB's overreach, puffery, and false statements through our most 'effectual weapon,' the power of the purse.

"The Supreme Court has the opportunity to confirm what Republicans have said all along-the CFPB's unaccountable funding structure is unconstitutional, and the agency must be brought under the appropriations process.

"Congress should act now to reassert the power of the purse and ensure unelected bureaucrats do not have the ability to run roughshod over personal rights of consumers and law-abiding businesses.

"Through a design feature in the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB was purposely set up to insulate a government agency from proper Congressional oversight.

"The CFPB was set up to ensure unbridled power for an authoritarian agency head who wants to exercise partisan and unreasoned control over financial services, with the ultimate goal of turning financial institutions into public utilities.

"Unfortunately for consumers, the CFPB's policy actions under Director Chopra's leadership have become almost entirely reckless, arbitrary, and capricious.

"Pushing new rules, guidance, variable enforcement actions, blog posts, and email blasts that border on anti-capitalist propaganda does not promote consumer protection.

"The CFPB's activities under Director Chopra's leadership will serve primarily to increase costs of financial services to consumers and reduce availability of those services, especially to traditionally underserved communities.

"This is quite the opposite outcome of what you'd expect from the agency tasked with protecting consumers.

"The CFPB has increasingly become a hyper-partisan agency doing the bidding of the White House and the President's reelection campaign rather than protecting American consumers.

"It answers to no one but itself and sometimes to the courts, where the CFPB Director's approach of using rhetoric and partisan theorizing over evidence and the law is often rejected.

"Where the administration does not have the authority or votes in Congress to make a change, the CFPB simply forges ahead and uses subterfuge to make new laws, unchecked.

"I look forward to discussing these important issues in our hearing today. We must understand the consequences of a rogue CFPB and explore the steps Congress must take to rein in the CFPB to better protect our citizens from an unchecked federal bureaucracy.

"There must be guardrails on a rogue agency like the current CFPB, and that must at least begin with holding the CFPB's use of federal resources accountable, transparent, and subject to Congressional checks."

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