Mr. Mulvaney requests…

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney is one of the all-stars among President Trump’s cabinet level appointees. President Trump had the inspired idea to appoint him acting director of the constitutional monstrosity known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Richard Cordray departed to run for elective office. Before his departure, however, in the lawless spirit of the bureau itself, Cordray sought to name his own successor. We admired his performance facing down the media in “Mulvaney meets the press.”

With the help of her Democrat friends riding high in the Obama era, Elizabeth Warren designed the bureau in her own imperious image. It don’t need your stinking dollars. See Judd Gregg’s Hill column “Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB.” The bureau takes its funding directly from the Federal Reserve based on quarterly requests submitted by the director.

The bureau represents the administrative state in highly evolved form. The Democratic proponents of this form of government and their media adjunct mean for us to lose the ability to control our masters. We are to be ruled by them as experts exerting power in our own best interest. They know what is best for us and they mean to give it to us good and hard.

Mulvaney made news this week when he requested nothing from the Fed. By letter dated January 17, 2018, Mulvaney wrote:” This letter is to inform you that for Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2018, the Bureau is requesting $0.” Michael Grunwald reported for Politico on Mulvaney’s letter here.

Kim Strassel devoted her weekly Wall Street Journal column (behind the Journal’s paywall) to Mulvaney’s good works at the bureau. Even the marvelous Mulvaney can’t kill the monster all by himself. He nevertheless seeks to limit its harm (as Strassel demonstrates).

Quotable quote (Kim Strassel): “[T]he administration has spent the year engaging in the most systematic overhaul of government since Reagan, with consequences that could reverberate for a generation. Nowhere is the disconnect between short-term flimflam and long-term change more evident than in Mick Mulvaney’s refurbishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

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