(Bloomberg) — Senator Elizabeth Warren praised a federal judge’s ruling on Tuesday requiring the Trump administration to seek funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The ruling by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington DC was a rebuke to attempts by Russell Vought, acting director of the CFPB, to invalidate the regulator’s funding, which relied on its ability to draw funds from the Federal Reserve.
“A federal court rejected the Trump Administration’s most recent, ridiculous attempt to starve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of funding,” Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who pushed to create the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, said in a statement. “If courts continue to uphold the law, they’ll keep blocking Russ Vought’s illegal attempts to ‘close down’ the agency that has returned $21 billion directly to Americans who were cheated by big banks and giant corporations.”
The ruling represents a major development in the months-long lawsuit against Vought brought by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents CFPB staff. Vought, who also serves as White House Budget Director, said in October that he hoped to shut down the agency “within the next two or three months.”
A spokesperson for the CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It appears that defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the [CFPB] of funding and yet another attempt to achieve the very end the Court’s injunction was put in place to prevent,” Berman Jackson wrote.
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