NEW YORK (AP) — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has decided to abandon a controversial renaming plan, in one of the first big decisions by its new permanent director.
The CFPB will no longer pursue renaming itself the “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection,” a change that had been sought by Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s acting director of the bureau. The decision was announced in an email by Kathy Kraninger, who became the CFPB’s permanent director earlier this month.
The CFPB was created by the Dodd-Frank Act, the law that rewrote the rules governing the banking and financial system after the 2008 financial crisis. The bureau was called the “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection” in the law, but the CFPB has never referred to itself that way. Mulvaney had argued he was just following the letter of the law when it came to renaming the bureau.
Kraninger cited cost factors in renaming the bureau as well as years of branding and identification the CFPB had built up over the last decade. The banking industry has thousands of disclosures and paperwork that referred to the CFPB, and reprinting those documents could have been a significant cost.
“Many of us have legal names but use nicknames without much confusion. My birth certificate says Kathleen, but I also answer to Kathy. I think we can do the same here. I believe this decision is most efficient and effective for our continued work together,” Kraninger said in her email.
Kraninger’s email was published by Allied Progress, a left-wing advocacy group. Many consumer groups and allies of the bureau in Congress argued the name change was unnecessary and purely political.
“Mick Mulvaney’s silly, wasteful, and confusing fight to change the CFPB’s name was little more than a petty plow to undermine the bureau’s hard-won reputation as a champion for consumers,” Allied Progress’ director Karl Frisch said in a statement.
