Rohit Chopra Still Has A Job

CFPB Director Rohit Chopra testifies during a Senate Banking Committee hearing, June 12, 2024, in Washington.

In the early days of his second term, Donald Trump has made a big show of firing bureaucrats. He is rooting out anyone in the government with anything resembling “DEI” in their title. He has removed senior Justice Department officials. He has fired the heads of the Coast Guard and the Transportation Safety Administration. The mass culling has been impulsive and perhaps foolhardy, considering the need to, you know, have someone running the government in order to make it do what you want.

But improbably, one official everyone expected to be sacked is still standing as we near the end of week one of Trump II: Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). And this is freaking Wall Street out.

Chopra is in the midst of a five-year term as director that could take him all the way to October 2026. But under a 2020 Supreme Court ruling in Seila Law, the president has the ability to remove the head of the CFPB at will. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he told Trump CFPB director Kathy Kraninger to either quit or be fired; she chose to quit about an hour after his inauguration.

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Chopra has not done so, and though it was expected that he would be quickly let go, his office continues to be active. On Tuesday, CFPB announced a settlement with Argus Information and Advisory Services, a TransUnion subsidiary, CFPB contractor, and serial violator of several financial and data privacy laws. Argus agreed to not seek any contracts with CFPB for five years. Then on Thursday, CFPB released a report showing growing instances of auto repossessions, well above the pre-pandemic level. And Chopra, at his still-active Twitter feed, announced a new request for information on the consumer credit market, seeking data from customers about terms, conditions, and interest rates.

“Given the growing bipartisan interest in addressing concerns over credit card interest rates and fees, the CFPB will be analyzing data and input, as required by the CARD Act, and publish additional research to inform this policy debate,” Chopra wrote, referring to Trump’s tossed-off comment during the campaign about lowering credit card interest rates to 10 percent.

This all comes after CFPB engaged in a flurry of lawsuits, rules, and actions at the end of the Biden term, presumably in the expectation of Chopra being shown the door. But he has not received any word from the Trump administration about anything. “I am ready to hand off the baton if they have a runner ready, but until that time, we are dealing with a lot of work at the bureau,” Chopra told Politico on Wednesday.

CHOPRA WAS ONE OF BIDEN’S most active foot soldiers in governance, banning and limiting junk fees across the banking industry, suing bad actors, eliminating medical debt from credit reports, and much more. During his tenure, corporate offenders returned more than $6 billion to consumers and paid more than $3.2 billion in civil penalties.

Sources tell the Prospect that Trump’s team has run into difficulty finding anyone who wants to take the job, with the directive to essentially halt all this work. Kraninger, who held the position from 2018 to 2021 and is now CEO of the Florida Bankers Association; Brian Johnson, one of Kraninger’s top aides who now runs compliance for Capital One (which was just hit with a CFPB lawsuit for cheating customers out of interest payments); and former Trump FDIC chair Jelena McWilliams have all been offered the job and turned it down.

A fourth candidate, former Trump Treasury official Craig Phillips (who has also worked for Morgan Stanley and BlackRock), decided to go to Freddie Mac instead.

Unlike during the early Biden administration, there aren’t that many internal candidates available who would be willing to run CFPB to Trump’s liking. Hiring an outside candidate to run the agency while awaiting confirmation would violate the hiring freeze Trump instituted by executive order.

Allies of Chopra are making the point that his agenda is actually consistent with Trump’s America First rhetoric.

Another option would be to have an existing Senate-confirmed official take over at CFPB for a spell, while still holding their old job. This is a controversial tactic, but it was used successfully to have Trump Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney take over at CFPB in 2017. However, that would create other problems.

Jonathan McKernan is a Republican board member of the FDIC who could slide over to do the job, but that would drop the FDIC board down to just two members. The CFPB director has a seat on the board, so if McKernan slides over there it eliminates one slot; Travis Hill, the other Republican on the board, has taken the acting chair position after Martin Gruenberg resigned, and there is no current comptroller of the currency after Michael Hsu stepped down.

The other name that has been floated is Melissa Holyoak, currently a Republican member of the Federal Trade Commission. But the FTC bylaws say that no commissioner can take outside work; Holyoak would have to resign to become acting CFPB director, and that would give effective control of the FTC to its Democratic commissioners.

There is a Trump review team for CFPB, led by George Mason professor Todd Zywicki and Holyoak’s chief of staff Christopher Mufarrige, both of whom formerly worked at CFPB. But without a Trump-friendly director, there’s not a lot that can be done.

THERE IS A REGULATORY FREEZE IN PLACE, so Chopra’s CFPB is unable to work on new consumer protection rules, at least for now. But enforcement actions, data collection, and other important activities are still fair game.

The businesses CFPB regulates are, let’s say, agitated. The Consumer Bankers Association told Punchbowl News that “the longer Director Chopra stays, the harder it will be for this pro-growth administration to undo the politically-driven, government-price-setting agenda that former President Biden’s appointee has engaged in over the last several years.”

Meanwhile, allies of Chopra are making the point that his agenda is actually consistent with Trump’s America First rhetoric, if not the reality of his actions typically. “You don’t show you have populist chops by firing someone who has done as much for families and consumers as Rohit Chopra,” said Carter Dougherty, communications director for Americans for Financial Reform.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about their plans for CFPB.

Chopra does have a few strange-bedfellow allies in MAGA-world. In a 2022 profile for the Prospect, I got a laudatory comment about Chopra from Peter Navarro, who is back in the White House now as a senior counselor to the president. Chopra “wanted to get stuff done,” Navarro told me in an interview. “The MAGA folks on the Republican side should embrace him, the traditional working-class Dems should embrace him.”

The fact that no conservative wants to actually take the job at CFPB is kind of fascinating. No voter is clamoring for less protection against scams and fraud, as Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project notes. “Being the hatchet person for the sort of chiselers and grifters that the CFPB fights against is not exactly a fun job—especially as some elements within MAGA could potentially call you out.”

But if Chopra continues to make life miserable for financial operators and oligarchs—Big Tech has been one of his main concerns—the pressure to dump him will grow. “Inevitably, Trump will accede to his fellow grifters and someone will accept the mantle as savior to Wells Fargo and the like,” Hauser said.

It’s just amusing that the time hasn’t come yet. Amid all the other wreckage, watching Wall Street squirm a bit is at least a tiny bit of solace.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story cited American Banker reporting that Christopher Mufarrige being in place at CFPB. This is incorrect—he was only on the agency review team—and we have updated our story.