Rick Scott: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exists to ‘harass Americans’

Rick Scott

U.S. Senator Rick Scott is co-sponsoring legislation to end the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and he’s telling the media that the agency’s sunset is long overdue.

“It’s just money to go harass Americans. They harass Floridians. It’s just money to harass them, and guess what? Trump is doing the right thing. I mean, he’s done so many things, but shutting down this CFPB would be unbelievably important to help build our economy,” Scott told Charlie Kirk on Monday.

Scott backs Sen. Ted Cruz’s “Defund the CFPB Act.“

That bill would zero out payments to the agency.

Scott’s comments come after Russ Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, directed workers to “cease all supervision and examination activity,” as an email obtained by the Associated Press notes.

The issue is one where partisan disagreement is guaranteed.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a staunch advocate for the agency, calls the CFPB “the cop on the beat … the one who has worked, day by day, to get your money back when some slimeball decided they could cheat you and there wouldn’t be anything you can do about it … the little agency that has fought for us.”

The landmark Dodd-Frank Act created the agency during Barack Obama’s presidency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“Part of the purpose of creating the Bureau was to increase accountability in government by consolidating consumer financial protection authorities that had existed across seven different federal agencies into one. Consumer financial protection had not been the primary focus of any federal agency, and no agency had effective tools to set the rules for and oversee the whole market. The result was a system without effective rules or consistent enforcement,” the agency asserts on its webpage.